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Looks like they finnaly have a sponsor http://community.reactos.org/?...

In Undocumented Dos they explained that the version of Dos was a "a hacked version of MSDOS ... mostly removing the file system". NTVDM runs real mode Dos programs in V86 mode. So what happens is that when when you make an int 21h call to open a file in a Dos program? You real mode code hits a BOP. A BOP is an illegal opcode. At that point the processor traps (or software emulator on a Risc machine calls out) and you end up running fairly standard user mode protected mode code which handles the file open.

You can see it here in Reactos

http://old.reactos.org/wiki/DO...

In order to implement the DOS "API" (int 21, etc.) we need a way to call Win32 and kernel procedures from the VM thread. This is accomplished in Microsoft's NTVDM by writing a stub 16-bit kernel (ntdos.sys, ntio.sys, ...) that hooks the same interrupts as a 16-bit DOS kernel would, but instead of actually handling these, it executes a special undefined opcode (C4 C4 followed by some more bytes indicating the desired operation) in order to trap back into kernel mode/protected mode (meaning execution will pass through KiTrap6, "INT 06: Invalid Opcode Code (#UD)"). The request is dispatched to the proper VDM and handled in protected mode, and then an iret takes execution back to the instruction after the invalid opcode sequence.

There is an alternative, ReactOS.

But it isn't viable yet.

I strongly encourage everybody to contribute somehow.

I would like to see this actually become a viable option, but I'm more excited by Android-x86.
Many of the XP hold outs do have an Android phone already, turning the learning curve into a slight bump. That being said I don't know if Android-x86 will ever be ported back to XP age hardware...

switched over to ReactOS and everything will just work the same.

There is an alternative, ReactOS.

But it isn't viable yet.

I strongly encourage everybody to contribute somehow.

You may be pleasantly surprised.

If not, try it now and if it works you've solved the problem with no real UI change.

And someone should have written an open source equivalent of Windows XP too. Just because something seems logical doesn't mean it's easy.

Microsoft will never Opensource XP. Mostly because it would be a major liability with no benefit to them. Yes, liability. If you have your programmers going through the code and find a module that obviously didn't work like it was supposed to, and exposed the machines to a 0-day hack, your lawyers would race to file law suites against Microsoft to compensate for the companies losses. Or lets say you figure out what ALL the settings in the registry do, including the ones for exclusive use of the FBI/NSA/Microsoft. Now you know that they were fully able to bypass the Microsoft supplied firewalls, and grab whatever info they wanted. And you would spill that knowledge all over the net.

Where is Microsoft's benefit in all this? It's just not there.

The only project to Opensource XP that I've heard of is ReactOS, and it is STILL in Alpha stage, even after all these years. I suppose if the demand for it is there, some companies could be encouraged to donate time/money and accelerate the project, for their own benefit.

And why wouldn't .Net stuff that works on XP not work on an XP compatible OS?

I'm not saying ReactOS is fully XP compatible, it's far from it at the moment. But perhaps with enough resources it would become compatible enough? Then maybe Microsoft will think twice before shoving stuff like Vista and Windows 8 to customers.

As it is you can already install the .Net 2.0 redistributable package on it. http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.3.15
Whether it works or not is another thing ;).

ReactOS takes an initiative and gets part of its kernel rewritten in c++
Aleksey Bragin, the project coordinator writes:
"Monstera is a new implementation of a memory manager (along with a cache manager) compatible with the ReactOS kernel at source code level and providing the same binary compatible Native API through a lightweight wrapper. Monstera is implemented in a subset of C++ programming language. ...
Key ideas:
1. Object oriented language for object oriented kernel. When NT was implemented, C++ wasn't that good.
...
4. Don't drift away too much. It's still based on NT architecture, but think of it as if Microsoft Research would decide to reimplement NT in C++ for fun."

Hi Timothy,

Unfortunately, you didn't provide a lot of information in your post as to what the problems are.

As people have pointed out, there are a ton of USB to Serial solutions out there so having the modern hardware with the ability to communicate over RS-232 is generally not a problem (although, depending on the connections used, you might want to invest in a RS-232 breakout box and read up on RS-232 handshaking as many of the older devices do use hardware handshaking). I have a few hand wired 9 pin to 25 pin connectors with the CTS-RTS and DSR-DTR pins shorted together as they can simplify your life immeasurably.

In my experience, the biggest problem is retaining floppies & CDs with the original software on them (assuming that the developers are no longer supporting the product/are out of business). If the company is still in business, usually they're pretty good at providing updated software for their products. If they're not in business, then look to see if they were bought out by anybody. Chances are you'll find that the purchaser is still supporting the product, although it may be under another name.

Personally, the biggest issue that I see when I have encountered this type of situation is that the original programs are on floppies. If this is the case, you will need to find somebody with a Windows/95 machine that they're keeping together with spit, bailing wire, gaffer's tape and good intentions - you should be able to copy the program onto a USB key and then burn it on a CD/DVD for more permanent storage.

Once you have the program in a media that you can work with, you may have problems with the installation. You will probably have to create a virtual machine on your PC AND there may be 16 bit programs that you have to convert to 32 bit - here's a great resource that's saved me a couple of times: http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=10988

Finally, Google is your friend. Chances are the answers are out there for your particular equipment.

Good luck!

myke

People really need to give their support to alternative projects like React OS http://www.reactos.org/

Then perhaps "the majority of its customers" should donate another $20,000 to finish ReactOS Foundation's current round of fundraising. ReactOS is a project to make an open-source binary-compatible clone of Windows XP.

I'm not getting one thing - why would they need all versions of .NET - aren't they all compatible?

No. AFAIK from a program perspective each version of .NET is independent. I know for certain that .NET 3.0 and .NET 4.0 must both be present on an XP system to run applications compiled against 3.0 and 4.0 respectively. You can see that React themselves are tracking the different frameworks as separate sub-projects: http://www.reactos.org/compat/?show=entry&id=646

Oh, and as far as Networking goes, support only IPv6 initially, and let IPv4 support be a separate addon program later - if needed. For both OSs

I'm all in favor of IPv6 migration. But many Win7 and certainly many XP applications are IPv4 only. v4 vs. v6 isn't the problem though between Win7 and XP. XP had a fairly basic networking stack. Win 7 has a networking stack with many layers of complexity each with their own API and the capabilities for self and programatic adjustments which are truly impressive http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/bb545475.aspx

___

The reason I'm arguing for the same time, is that mostly we are looking at subsets in terms of technology. There isn't much that's thrown away and each step builds on the previous replacing simple systems with vastly more complex systems. But even if that weren't the case, Win 7 includes compatibility modes, and many of them. So for example programs can make use of Win95/WinMe compatibility subsystem. And then quite literally you need to a have a functioning DOS for Win 7 application compatibility since some Win 7 applications still have parts that use emulated DOS.

____

The only thing ReactOS has going for them is the huge number of people still using XP and thus the huge number of applications that don't want to walk away from XP compatibility. The problem is more and more those XP users are people who just don't buy software at all. Once the developers move away from XP the desire to support Win8 is going to push them towards later versions of the .NET framework and ReactOS is going to be a system for legacy support.

That's not bad, but it ain't a threat to Microsoft.

I wonder in 2023 we will be having XPBOX or FreeXP since it has so many die hard users who refuse to leave kicking and screaming the whole time.

I think that one is called ReactOS.

I actually looked into the possibility of running Windows programs for x86 on other processors. Read posts with my name "BrentNewland" http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11078&sid=9213440b9627ba56a8beb204022e2bae#p91132 Same method applies to both WINE and ReactOS. In essence, you run the program on an x86 emulator (like QEMU). Supposedly little of the actual program is x86-specific, the majority is resources and Windows API calls. QEMU takes care of the platform-specific code, and any API requests are sent to Wine, which is compiled for the processor. That way it's not emulating the entire OS or the entire Win32API, which is supposed to allow performance up to 50% of native.

It's a perfect chance for ReactOS, and we won't miss it.

Alright, here's my shtick... It's a great race between two open source software ecosystems: copyLEFT and copyFREE.

The copyFREE side is a more amicable pacifist bunch, with more freedoms and more choices, and it has been gaining ground in the last decade in all software categories but one - the kernels. The copyLEFT side was founded by a bunch of militant hippies trying to destroy capitalism, and it had several years' head start, so its viral licenses were grandfathered into some of the most important pieces of open source software. The OS projects within each team like to share code, and the copyLEFT team can also mooch copyFREE code as well, but not the other way around...

This race is contested on many fronts, and one obscure comparison (that I just came up with) is: while running the race forward, to still maintain support for the 80386 platform. Only UNIX systems (sorry, sorry, sorry) that can run on a 80386 PC (sorry, sorry) with actively maintained current versions (sorry) are to be included. Let's see how the two teams compare:

THE COPYLEFT TEAM:

(1) Linux - now i486, as mentioned in this article.

THE COPYFREE TEAM:

(1) FreeBSD - i486 since 2005.

(2) OpenBSD - i486 since 2007.

(3) NetBSD - i486, "80386 support removed" in 2007.

(4) MINIX 3 - i586, 32mb RAM, 635mb HD.

So it looks like the copyLEFT camp had this little "current UNIX on 80386" advantage, and now lost it...

--libman

Also thanks to this little open source effort.

We saw Vista, 7 and now 8 and each generation offers such awesome improvements over the previous... I dare Microsoft to open-source Windows XP on May 1st, 2014. I don't see it happen, but you may want to have a look at ReactOS. If you ask me, OpenXP would be a better name for it.

Wonder when Reactos will be ready for a switch from Win7. Win7 and Win8 are nice but you don't get the source code. I have a vision of Putin in front of a Notebook programming the next operating system. I guess his programming skills are better than Steve Ballmer's.

An open-source Windows (like ReactOS) rather than an open-source unix might had been something.

But it's not.

Also does the goal have to be that they switch?

It could still be a good desktop without having a large part of the market share if people simply wanted Windows anyway. Now I don't think everything is good with the Linux desktop but it's not necessary worse than the rest of the options either except when it comes to professional and more "complex" software (except the web browser) where the open-source attempts likely fall short.

Windows is obviously both a good desktop AND Windows.

This page http://www.reactos.org/en/about_history.html talks about the history of ReactOS. Notice how it starts with "ReactOS project since 1996". Granted, not all of this was under the name ReactOS, but it was the same people. The page states that "In February 1998, ReactOS began.".

16 years is a reasonable number.

For anyone that wants to try ReactOS out, I highly recommend the ARWINSS fork, which is a new Win32 subsystem for ReactOS that reuses as much Wine code as possible. The ARWINSS architecture implements APIs exposed via USER32 and GDI32 libraries and is based upon Wine source-code. In my testing the stability and compatibility was much better then the official release. You can find it here:

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Arwinss

I think Microsoft is coming close... very close... to a spontaneous shift towards open-source Win32. The butchery of Windows 8 is certainly moving things right along.

When a major corporate donor emerges, Microsoft's final phase has begun.

HP, Dell, Acer, and whoever else they can recruit should pledge $1 million for REACTOS development.

http://reactos.org

Windows 8: enough of this foolishness.

Only 1 million? That might get you a boot loader.

HP, Dell, Acer, and whoever else they can recruit should pledge $1 million for REACTOS development.

http://reactos.org

Windows 8: enough of this foolishness.

Yes

ReactOS struggled with SEH, but they found a way.

It could, using the alternative windowing subsystem (X11). And in fact that branch is used to compare Wine vs. ReactOS behavior in certain cases.

Accoding to http://windows.kde.org/ the Windows port of KDE is not functional - but a Windows port would mean that all of the underlying API calls implemented by ReactOS have to be implemented and correct, or the port won't run anyway.

Finally, the point of ReactOS is that Windows programs should run on it. There is no reason to introduce KDE, when you have to write things like explorer.exe and the whole shell that Windows programs expect to have. The "crap that they spend their time on" is making a binary-compatible Windows OS.

The ReactOS and the Wine project share a lot of code (most of the userspace libraries. Consider ReactOS as a Wine userland + WinNT-like kernel). So therefore, the day ReactOS is actually a complete OS that can run 100% of windows software, is also the day that Wine can run all the Windows software too.

Not according to ReactOS's home page.

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

"The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change."

I don't see anything about adding improvements there.

Well, I guess this gives an alternative to an alternative for that old pentium 100 I have in the attic...

In all seriousness, I guess this COULD be eventually useful if they manage to get it working with modern DirectX games and such... While I'm a Linux guy, I do enjoy gaming, natively and in WINE. ReactOS as I understand it contributes code to WINE (and vice-versa)...so IMHO it's still a win. Not necessarily epic yet, but it could be. That symbiotic relationship is worth something...I'm just not sure what.

Didn't you read the headline? "improved networking stack" -- That was XP!

At least the project is in the spirit of things: http://www.reactos.org/about.html

From reactos.org:

ReactOS is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows-NT architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level.

As a gamer it is just a lot more simple to use windows. I have tried other Operating Systems but honestly I find that windows is easier to use now. I have not had a virus in years, I have access to any program I might need, applications are simple and easy to install (double click and done) and why would I emulate windows when I can just save time and run windows itself. I am keeping an eye on ReactOS which might prove itself enough to switch over. http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

Yeah, I use Linux, but mainly "CLI" coz the "popular" linux desktops are shit and have got even shittier. They're not good for the noobs. They're not good for the nerds. The Linux Desktop bunch should get a clue, if "screen" ( http://www.gnu.org/s/screen/ ) is still better and faster at task managing than your GUI, you've failed. If normal users are still having problems with sound, you've failed.

As for Windows, too bad reactos isn't making progress fast enough: http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

Otherwise it would be nice to see Microsoft sweat more (but not Ballmer tho ;) ) to actually come up with a better product .

How compatible will it be in the future?

Completely compatible. They have a website that can answer your mind-numbingly googleable questions at reactos.org. Also, stop karma whoring.

I don't know if angry ninjas were actively involved, but I remember a few years ago they basically froze development to do a code audit. Something about making sure they were able to prove there was nothing in the code base that had been reverse engineered and that all the code was either freshly written or had been copied from publicly-available sources. http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Audit

I had the same experience with ReactOS as several other posters... I installed it on a VM, saw all of the screenshots on the site of "look what we can run!" and tried to replicate some of those, and basically had one crash after another

200+ comments and no one has mentioned ReactOS. When ReactOS finally hits 1.0 Microsoft can kiss OEM sales bye-bye. Who in their right mind is going to shell out $200 for an OS that restricts installs and phones home when they can have a 100% Windows compatible OS for free?

This is true...And there is also Amiga.

http://www.a-eon.com/index.html

But I'm happy enough with my humble Linux distro.

200+ comments and no one has mentioned ReactOS. When ReactOS finally hits 1.0 Microsoft can kiss OEM sales bye-bye. Who in their right mind is going to shell out $200 for an OS that restricts installs and phones home when they can have a 100% Windows compatible OS for free?

Maybe by then the windows-XP-compatible project will be mature. :^)

She should install ReactOS just to fuck with the professor.

It's time for all coders to go over and give the guys at REACTOS a hand getting it out of Alpha.

Haiku and ReactOS both made it this year!

Two of my favorite alternative OS projects... :D

(2) Or if I can't have that, a clone of the Windows OS so I'm no longer locked into the Microsoft Monopoly when running MS software. Something like Wine but bigger.

Something like ReactOS?

(Note: I've not actually used it but it looks interesting...)

Are you kidding, not aware of AROS and ReactOS, or just commenting on how they both still have a ways to go?

Assuming the second, check these out(and possibly contribute, if you want to help speed development):

(1) AROS Research Operating System - The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas.
(2) React Operating System - ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows-NT® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

The blurbs next to each link are quoted from the homepages of AROS and ReactOS, respectively, and are not my personal opinion.

>> what more do you want?

> Amiga OS. I miss it. Or if I can't have that, a clone of the Windows OS so I'm no longer locked into the Microsoft Monopoly when running MS software. Something like Wine but bigger.

Aside from the fact that it is still in alpha 12 years after it was started, what you're describing is ReactOS: http://www.reactos.org/

But FYI, so long as you need to run apps designed for "the Microsoft Monopoly", you will always be locked into it in.

you will find out that you can run Windows 95 in dosbox with some tweaks.

But then how are GOG and the like supposed to distribute copies of games that ran in Windows 95, as suggested in this comment? Microsoft no longer makes available the "boot disk" and "setup files" referenced on your tutorial, and even if it did, they'd be too expensive. FreeDOS is a feature-complete Free clone of MS-DOS, but the Free clone of Windows is nowhere near that level simply because Windows itself is so big.