1. Build environment

To build the system you need either mingw32 installed on Windows or a mingw32
cross compiler running on unix. You may obtain MinGW binaries that build
ReactOS from http://www.reactos.org/. 


2. Building ReactOS

2.1 Building the binaries

To build ReactOS run 'make' (without the quotes) if you are building on Linux
or 'mingw32-make' if you are building on Windows (or ReactOS) from the top
directory.


2.2 Building a bootable CD image

To build a bootable CD image run 'make bootcd' (without the quotes) if you are
building on Linux or 'mingw32-make bootcd' if you are building on Windows (or
ReactOS) from the top directory. This will create a CD image with a filename,
ReactOS.iso, in the top directory.


3. Installation

ReactOS can only be installed on a machine that has a FAT16 or FAT32 partition
as the active (bootable) partition. The partition on which ReactOS is to be
installed (which may or may not be the bootable partition) must also be
formatted as FAT16 or FAT32. ReactOS Setup can format the partitions if
needed.

ReactOS can be installed from the source distribution or from the bootable CD
distribution. The two ways to install ReactOS are explained below.


3.1 Installation from sources

If you don't have an existing ReactOS installation you want to upgrade, then
build a bootable CD as described above. Burn the CD image, boot from it, and
follow the instructions to install ReactOS.

If you have an existing ReactOS installation you want to upgrade, then to
install ReactOS after building it, type 'make install' or
'mingw32-make install'. This will create the directory 'reactos' in the top
directory. Copy the contents of this directory over the existing installation.

If you don't want to copy the files manually every time you run a
'make install' or 'mingw32-make install', then you can specify the directory
where the files are to be copied to during installation.

Set the ROS_INSTALL environment variable. If you are on Windows this could be
done by:

  set ROS_INSTALL=c:\reactos

If you are on Linux this could be done by:

  export ROS_INSTALL=/mnt/windows/reactos

Now run 'make install' or 'mingw32-make install' to install the files to the
new location.


3.2 Installation from bootable CD distribution

To install ReactOS from the bootable CD distribution, extract the archive
contents. Then burn the CD image, boot from it, and follow instructions.


5. Help

If you run into problems or have suggestions for making ReactOS better, please
visit the address below. Mailing lists are available for a variety of topics, 
bugs should be submitted to bugzilla and general chat takes place in the forums, 
or #reactos on freenode

http://www.reactos.org/

ReactOS Development Team
