I recently found myself downloading a copy of the ReactOS platform. Ofcourse I did download the Live CD but wasn’t able to run it, because this stupid machine decided it didn’t want to after I deleted all of my partitions. I haven’t had chance to try it out on ‘the other machine’ but will do. Don’t think it’ll work because it didn’t in Parallels. It was only 22.[something I can't remember]MB, well it was an ISO but it was all safely zipped up. I thought that it was quite small for a operating system, because Freespire took several hours to download on a somewhat fast connection, but the actual ISO file is little more than a shocking 75MB.

So after all that kerfuffle of the live cd, I just downloaded the QEMU one, which was again very small, obviously because it was all zipped up. I extracted it and ran the “boot.bat” file. I must say how very fast QEMU was at emulating it, it didn’t lag at all and took less than 20 seconds to load up fully. So I started exploring, but soon realised that it was a huge work in progress. The main reason I downloaded was because its claimed that it has the ability to run EXE files. If you don’t know what they are, they’re executables, or programs for short. Those of you may know that I have made some software in the past, namely AMV Studio and AMV Studio Utilites (they’re both different programs) and I wanted to test them on they’re. One problem is that because it was emulating in QEMU that has no options, it automatically chose the wrong network adapter, my internal one for Parallels, not my Local Area or Wireless (but my LAN cable wasn’t plugged in at the time, only Wireless was connected), I couldn’t access the internet. I could hardly find the browser, since it wasn’t in the ‘Internet’ menu, what a minute, there wasn’t even an ‘Internet’ menu. I had to run the ReactOS Explorer program, which when I pressed the ‘Web’ button, prompted me to download some Mozilla ActiveX control thing.

To illustrate some problems I’ve had and what ReactOS is currently capable of doing, I compiled a small gallery with about 6 screenshots. To see it, visit http://www.callumhaywood.com/services/reactos/screenshots/.

Argh! Since installing WordPress on my server, I often find that it can’t handle it – namely Abyss (my servers HTTP daemon software) will return a “Error 500″ message, what makes it worse though is that IE change the default error pages to their own, damn you Microsoft! Another reason to switch to Mozilla Firefox!

Apart from those few problems, and I acknowledge that its nothing to do with WordPress its self, just my server, I think that WordPress is excellent! The best blogging software ever, well that I’ve ever used. Please remeber I use Windows XP!