How To Install Reactos On Netbooks

Windows 7 is free for now, and works extremely well on netbooks. That said, installing the OS on these tiny laptops—especially low-end models—can be daunting. Here's how to do it, the easy way:

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ReactOS 0.4 also now supports VirtualBox, allowing you to install and test the operating system in a virtual machine (although the official VirtualBox image isn’t ready for download just yet. Dec 17, 2009 reub2000 wrote:I'd be interested in seeing reactos running on netbooks too. Netbooks don't need all of the bloat thats in Windows 7. Netbooks don't need all of the bloat thats in Windows 7. IMO; ReactOS would be a great replacement for WinXP that is currently used in many netbooks and other small computers. I’m not 100% certain how the ReactOS installer actually works, but I expect it’s something like how the FreeBSD and NetBSD installers work, you have a set of archives that you install, one for each large ‘component’ of the system.

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What You'll Need

• A netbook (Minimum 1GB of RAM, 8GB storage space)

• A 4GB or larger USB drive

• A Windows 7 RC Image (details below)

• A Windows XP/Vista PC or a Mac to prepare the flash drive

• For low-end netbooks, lots (and lots) of time

Getting Windows 7

Downloading Windows 7 is a piece of cake. Just navigate to this page and download the 32-bit version. You'll need to get a free Windows Live ID if you don't already have one, but this takes about two minutes.

What Is Reactos

Microsoft will then give you your very own Windows 7 License key, valid until June 1st of next year. (Although after March 1st, it'll drive you to the edge of sanity by shutting off every two hours. But that's a different story, and March is a long way off). Microsoft will then offer up your ISO through a nifty little download manager applet, complete with a 'resume' function. There are ways to sidestep this, but don't: you'd be surprised how hard it is to keep a single HTTP connection alive for long enough to download a 2.36GB file.

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Install Reactos In Virtualbox

2. Run diskutil list and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)

3. Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN (replace N with the disk number from the last command; in the previous example, N would be 2)

4. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.iso of=/dev/diskN bs=1m (replace /path/to/downloaded.iso with the path where the image file is located; for example, ./windows7.iso)

5. Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes (this can take a few hours on slower drives)

As some commenters have pointed out, you can also make a flash drive bootable with utilities like LiveUSB Helper. Once you've done this, you can mount your Windows 7 ISO with a utility like DaemonTools Lite (For Windows) or MountMe (for Mac), and just copy over all the files to your newly-bootable drive.

Starting Your Install

Ok! Now you've got a bootable flash drive, and you're ready to start installing. It should go without saying, but once you start this process, you'll lose all existing data on your netbook, so you should back up any important files before going through with anything from here forward.

Insert your USB drive and reboot your netbook. As soon as your BIOS screen flashes, you should see instructions for a) changing your netbook's boot order or b) entering its BIOS setup. In the first situation, simply assign the USB drive as the first boot device. In the second, navigate through your BIOS settings until you find a 'Default Boot Order' page, and do the same thing there.

From there, you should see the first Windows 7 installation screens. Anyone with a 16GB or larger storage device in their netbook can just follow the instructions until the installation completes, and skip the next step.

How To Install Reactos

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If your SSD is smaller than 16GB, or if you just want to save some space, do what they say, but only until the first reboot. After the Windows 7 installer has restarted your computer, you'll need to modify the boot order again. Do not allow installation to continue! Manually change the boot order to prioritize the USB drive again, just as you did at the beginning of the installation.

Compression!

Once the Windows 7 installer has copied most of its system files to your drive, you're going to tighten them up with Windows' trusty old 'Compact' command. Here's what you do, as described by Electronic Pulp:

Choose 'Repair' at the Windows 7 Setup screen, go to 'Command Prompt' and enter the following code:

d: (or whatever drive letter is assigned to your SSD)
cd windowssystem32
compact.exe d:*.* /c /s /i

And wait. And wait and wait and wait. This can take anywhere from eight hours to two days, so you'll want to set your netbook down in a corner and forget about it for a while. [Note: compressing so many of your system files does have a performance cost, but in day-to-day use, it's negligible]

Once this is done, reboot the netbook again and let it continue the installation as normal. That's it!

Reactos Virtualbox Setup

All said and done, an 8GB SSD should have nearly 2GB of free space left—not much, but enough to work with. And given that most netbooks come with inbuilt, flush SD expansion slots, and that high-capacity SD cards are extremely affordable, having a small amount of space on your root drive isn't at all prohibitive.

There are other ways to slim down a Windows 7 install—namely by using programs like vLite, which can strip out some of Windows' fat directly from the ISO—but Windows' built-in file compression is the easiest way to squeeze Windows 7 onto your skimpy 8GB SSD.

Setup and Customization Help
Windows 7 runs fairly well out of the box, but as with any new Windows installation, you're going to need to download some drivers to get things working properly. Vista drivers usually do the trick, but sometimes workarounds are necessary. Thankfully, most popular netbooks have spawned helpful fan forums, many of which have active Windows 7 subforums. Some of the best:

• Aspire One
• ASUS Eee Pc
• Dell Mini
• MSI Wind
• HP Mini-Note

So there you go! Enjoy your new Windows 7 netbook! Please share your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. And of course, have a great weekend!

At home, I would not consider it because it is a Windows clone, and I have certain, strongly-held views on Windows. ;-)

At work, the problem is different - even if ReactOS achieved 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with Windows 10, using it on client PCs would be too painful, because every time some application misbehaved, there would be that lingering doubt if the problem is with the application itself or with the OS. And if you called some software vendor's support hotline, the moment you let it slip that you are running something that is not Windows, they would start laughing and hang up on you.

How To Install Reactos On Netbook

There are scenarios where I would consider a Windows 10-compatible ReactOS at work - e.g. for reviving a PC where the 'native' Windows version has gone out of support, and it only needs to run MS Office or Windows' RDP client, or a browser. But in the five years I have worked as Windows admin, this has happened so rarely I doubt it would matter a lot.

How To Install Reactos On Virtualbox

If the project got to the point where ISV's support hotlines did not care whether you are running MS Windows or ReactOS, ... that would change things in a big way.