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Steven Edwards On The Future Of ReactOS And Wine
Alex_Ionescu writes "WineHQ brings us the scoop on the latest developments in ReactOS, as well as on Steven Edward's excellent job on porting Wine to MingGW and linking the two platforms together. This is an interesting insight into the WINE and ReactOS project, and a must-read for anyone interested into the future of Windows-replacement projects like these."
Unix was cloned for a number of reasons. First, it's (or very similar clones) been used extensively in the teaching of college level OS courses (Lyons, Tanenbaum, et al), so when students decided to write their own, it was natural to model their OSes after what they'd learned. As has been beaten to death in the past few weeks, Minix was specifically designed to be small and compact so that students could understand it in a semester. How many versions of Windows is that true for? *BSD obviously came out of the education system, and Linux was written in response to Minix.
... hasn't. It's gotten remarkably better, and a good deal of its problems are due to 3rd party drivers, but my well maintained W2K desktop and XP laptop still need to be rebooted every two or three weeks. And there's the never ending string of serious vulnerabilities. At an OS level, Windows has a lot of nice ideas. The problem is, most discussions about them seem to run, "They had a nice idea, but..."
Second, Unix systems have been established a track record of power and reliability (yes, there have been very bad Unixes, and they tend to have been removed from the marketplace). Windows
Windows is changing rapidly, in ways that are likely to make programs incompatable with older versions (the better to force upgrades with, I'm sure). I'm sorry, but if after 7 years of work the project is almost within grasp of being able to use a DHCP client, I don't see any way they can keep up with Microsoft. If they want to work on it as a hobby and have fun doing so, more power to them. I just don't see it as being something overly useful. Screenshots of minesweeper (with poor graphics) aren't what I want to see. I want to see a version of Group Policies, Active Directory capability, and so on.
*BSD and Linux suceeded, not simply because of price, but because they were *better* in various ways than the competition. Microsoft has a tremendous software and driver collection, and has begun to do some really cool stuff. OS X has a simple UI that many people adore. What does ReactOS bring to the table, if it's three generations behind Microsoft? DR-DOS was cheaper and better (IMO) than MS-DOS, but Microsoft still ground it underneath their boots.
...I can't help but worry that Microsoft is going to screw them over. I think that the more ReactOS develops, the more likely we'll see an immoral patent-infringement lawsuit from Microsoft against ReactOS.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Although I don't see the use now, I know that 10 years from now on, I will say THANKS too all the developers that will have allowed anybody to use their old unsupported softwares...
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
I've been surprised how far ReactOS has come along. I didn't expect them to progress this much by now. I could actually install the last release on real hardware and it installed and ran AbiWord just fine! BTW a lot of people seem to have problems with the install CD .iso based installation of ReactOS. There is a simpler way to run it if you have a FAT16 or FAT32 C:\ boot partition, just download the binaries and unzip them to C:\ReactOS\. Then just boot from a DOS floppy and run aboot.bat within C:\ReactOS. Works like a charm everytime (for the past half dozen releases anyway). BTW if you insatall the VESA mode VBE driver (search the kernel mailing list) then you can get AbiWord working in true color. Its impressive to see it working considering how far ReactOS has yet to go.
porting Wine to MingGW
Hey, why not call it that? "Port"! I dunno if renaming a port is unusual, but if so I think we can make an exception in this case.
That's the most remarkable thing I see. That this project is close enough to functional to become a developer's main OS.
That's a pretty big step.
Wonder how long before it's ready for gaming?
Politas
Would that be the Chinese version?
I can see the usefulness of Wine, in running legacy programs as well as serving as a bridge between Windows apps and Linux. But why write an entire new OS for this same purpose? I just don't see the point of re-inventing yet another Windows wheel.
Perhaps starting from scratch (ReactOS) is easier than the writing the middleman layer (Wine), which is still playing catch up after many years?
(Any flames was unintentional. I would love for either project to succeed, I just want to know their merits)
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
WINE works, there just aren't enough developers. It's pretty amazing that WINE works as well as it does, and has the debugging and porting tools required to make development very easy for even the least experienced C programmer.
I think you missed the point of asking that question.
He's answering the question 'Why would you want to clone Windows?' by saying that it's analogous to asking Linus and/or RMS 'Why would you want to "clone" UNIX?'.
SuSE (7.0, manually upgraded lots of stuff from source since then), Wine CVS, StarCraft/Brood War and Red Alert 2 running perfectly in single player (forget IPX unless you're Novell certified, and Battle.NET doesn't work yet).
The interview is a good one. It's good to see both projects helping each other out. It's good to know that the efforts of the ReactOS team and WineHQ will make windows compatibility much easier.
Ambitious, but not likely to be relevant.
Wine is almost 10 years old and yet to ship a 1.0. And already bitrotting away because parts are still win16 (from reading the article) because they were coded pre windows95.
DOSEMU did eventually ship their 1.0 version... and was promptly deleted from the RH disks in the next rev as obsolete. It 'succeeded' because they were cloning a dead OS that didn't keep changing. If you count success as finishing long after it would have been widely useful.
Now we have ReactOS cloning Windows NT4. And will perhaps get it 90% feature complete in another few years. And then spend the next half decade completing the remaining 10% by which time NT4 will be so obsolete nobody will care. Of course they are already trying to shift their target to NT5.1 (XP) but like Wine, they just can't code as fast as the infinite monkeys at Microsoft.
As for their retort of "Why clone UNIX?" I have an easy answer. Because it is USEFUL. Microsoft's stuff isn't worth cloning and by the time a clone is finished they will have either won, forcing everyone into a DRMed hell where only their signed OSes even boot or we will have made them moot.
Democrat delenda est
Who in the bloody hell modded this guy flamebait? He wasn't flaming anyone, just pointing out a very scary possibility of the growth of ReactOS.
Anybody knows how to run Wine on Mandrake 10? pthread seems to hang up on Mandrake 9.2 or 10 but no problem on Slackware 9.1.
Maybe they would better combine and create a development model like GNU/Windows...
Truth nowadays is based upon the general consensus of the many
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WAP software
This is a joke, right?
With Slashdot comments being offline, I actually read the article. The interview went on and on, but for the life of me I can't figure out the point of this. Wine lets you run Windows software on UNIX platforms. MinGW lets you run recompiled UNIX software on Windows. What could POSSIBLY be the reason for porting Wine to MinGW? That would let you run Windows software ON WINDOWS. You can already DO that! It sounds like they are trying to reduce dependencies on UNIX in the Wine code. Balderdash. They are just trading them for a different set of dependencies. Sure, it's a smaller set, but it's not like Linux doesn't already run on EVERYTHING. What's the big deal if Wine depends on things in every standard Linux distro? Why reduce the set of dependencies further, other than to waste time?
These guys are caught up in the idea of making the code more beautiful for the sake of beauty. "Fewer dependencies makes it more elegant." They are ignoring the practical realities--don't reinvent the wheel and don't fix what ain't broke. Sure, it's their time to waste, but Good Lord.
Truly, this is the most pointless project, ever. I feel inspired to write a Commodore 64 emulator for my Commodore 64. Object-oriented, with a pre-emptive multithreading message-passing lightweight kernel. That'll be better.
Would it be possible to use the Wine code to run hardware driver code written specifically for windows, under linux? I guess it would be nice if this could be done without having the complete "wine" emulator in core, only the necessary components. Perhaps someone could write a windows driver -> linux driver converter, which takes the windows driver object code, and links in the necessary components from wine (only those win32 functions called by the driver, plus dependencies).
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
What we really need for those PC104 and other small boards is an OS with the following features:
open-source and configurable
reliable and stable
small resources requirements
working from ROM
Win32 compatible, supporting DCOM and MS-style networking.
There is no need for DirectX, scanner support and such. It looks much like that despite Microsoft declares embedded systems support as one of their primary goals, they just do not know what to do.
WinCE is for PDAs, not for industrial systems.
Consider ReactOS to be methadone to Microsoft's smack. If this project can provide a free, open source replacement for Microsoft products reaching the end of their supported life, it will provide a natural migration path away from MS. Hey kids, here's your choice - spend $$$ buying Longhorn ( and a monstrous PC to run it on ), or install ReactOS for free and keep running the all the software you know and love, on the same knackered old hardware.
Once that upgrade addiction cycle is broken, can you see users going back to MS products? Or are they likely to move onto another free OS if they feel the need? You tell me.
My only concern would be that, somehow, as soon as the project looks like being a serious threat, Billy Gates and his merry crew of pirates will f*ck it over.
"Buy 'em out, boys!"
> Huh? how do you figure the method most people use to connect to the
> internet isn't all that usefull.
Anyone hackish enough to be working on the HURD probably isn't using PPP.
I live in a rinkydink little town in Lousiana and am nowhere near leet enough to be working on the HURD and I haven't used PPP outside of hotel rooms since 2000. And even if someone is so unfortunate as to be forced to use a dialup, real hackers have home networks so only the gateway router needs to know PPP.
But this has wandered pretty offtopic so enough of PPP, ok?
Democrat delenda est
Wine the point is to create a windows clone. Wine has some of that functionality, but depends on Linux/bsd/unixy stuff to work.
What wine already has would be usefull in the NON-UNIX environment they a building.
Now thier choices are to
a) remove the dependancies on *nix from wine, somthing mingw helps with.
b) recreate everything usefull in wine from scratch (re-invent the wheel)
c) add a unix emulator for an nt workalike that will support wine so that thier running a windows workalike on a unix workalike on windows workalike.
Which do you think is thier best option.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Got it. Explanation understood. Thanks!
I agree. I've never seen a DSL modem that uses PPPoE.
Since we are mostly the topic of Wine, on the WineHQ screen shots page http://www.winehq.com/site?ss=1 they have an old link to my site ("Nathan Lineback's Wine Screen Shots") If they want to keep linking to it, It needs to be updated to point to http://toastytech.com/guis/wine.html The current link points to my very old pla-netx address that stopped redirecting to my new site recently.
I had tried e-mailing some contacts listed on the site, but there has been no responce. Who should I contact? Thanks.
It's 3.1 for me baby. Install Win3s's and those hacked up system files, shove calmira (calmira.de) on it and bam I've got a nice little system.
Steven has been a good friend of mine for many years. I can remember him trying to get StarCraft and IE working in WINE years ago. At the time, I thought that it was a wasted effort. I still do in a way, since I prefer native applications to using any form of Windows applications, but I am glad to see that Steven is now able to make a living off of something he loves. The article was quite good, and if you would have seen the improvements in ReactOS in the past year or two, you would be shocked. There wasn't even a GUI (at all) or a file manager even 2 years ago!
Talk about MEGA-COOL projects!
The way it's described in the article, soon, you'll have as high a probability of running Linux on ReactOS alongside your Windows apps as you will to running your windows apps alongside your Linux apps on Linux through Wine.
And all these projects share code and therefore testers.
Once more users and developers flock to these solutions, the level of quality will keep rising.
It really is going to be very interesting.
And probably nerve-wracking for Microsoft...
I really can't see where Microsoft's niche will be.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
The answer is c) Port it to the hurd
:-)
What else could be more funny than running a WindowsNT emulator on a GNU/GNU Kernel
Now if I could figure out how to make the HURD provide the NT kernel functions, this post would make sense.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
As Microsoft gets more restrictive and cost prohibitive with their licensing, ReactOS is going to become a great stepping stone from Windows Server to other platforms.
Essentially, it will let a small company focus on their core business without having to spend time and resources to transition to a new platform.
To fork out $800 per server plus CALs can hurt a small business. With a free windows server, they don't have to change their legacy code, yet can still expand their business.
Several companies I work with are frozen at Windows 2000. They couldn't afford to get 'software assurance' and Microsoft has eliminated server upgrade pricing. Combine that with software activation and a more restictive licensing plan in Windows 2003 and ReactOS becomes much more interesting.
You just hit the nail on the head there. We bash MS because they are bad, but we don't care much about helping to REPLACE the bad parts.
Your response gives your alternate to Windows, but without more insite, users like me do not or cannot use it because my system already has Windows, and we don't know how to replace it without screwing up all that mail etc., that we have put there for the past 3-5 years.
The general Windows user might change over to linux with wine and crossover but only with help and with complete choice of backing out.
Provide me with a CD or two that starts by helping me backup my windows system and data.
Re partition my HD as necessary to add linux and anything else I need.
Install Linux and Wine and Crossover and anything else I need.
Find my old data, programs, and setup links so I do not have to do that either.
And. dang it, unlike the new secure MOZILLA, give me the options of putting my address book, inbox, and bookmarks in any directory I choose so that with just a link, I can temporarily go back to my old set of files IF I NEED TO! (Is there some reason for not having address book as a simple text file that can be updated with Word or VI??)
I recall a Linix (Not Linux, but a Unix clone caled Linix for the C64) and GeOS being alternatives to the OS that the C64 used.
:)
:)
I also recall the ARP (AmigaDOS Replacement Project) for the Amiga.
All ReactOS seems to be is a replacement project to replace Windows. A better Windows than Windows, sounds like they borrowed that from OS/2.
ReactOS may not be worthwhile now for the average Windows user, but once Microsoft turns on us all and releases Longhorn that does not run Windows code, ReactOS may be ready to run enough Windows apps to matter.
The question is, will ReactOS also run the Windows Malware as well? Or will they have a "Sandbox" to prevent Malware infections?
P.S. Remember Freedows? Whatever happened to that project? I thought it was cool. Now it just vanished off the face of the Earth!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
>What could POSSIBLY be the reason for porting Wine to MinGW?
Maybe so you can test and debug your software on a single platform, and target it for multiple, making the development of cross-platform solutions easier? If I'm going to do a WineLib port, I imagine it would be very nice to see the native version running side by side with the WineLib version.
Maybe they've fixed these bugs by now; I don't know. I don't want to re-download their 12 megabyte self-extracting .EXE file to find out.
MS is always attempting to drag developers and (more importantly) customers to the latest version of their OS.
I can see an NT/Win2K ( no, no, PLEASE not XP ) compatible OS as something that many companies and people will see as a way off the MS treadmill of "another new OS that doesnt do much more for me, but is going to cost me a bunch in new hardware and new OS licencing".
It would give them a low cost ( hardware costs, training costs ), low overhead ( retraining issues ) option. A lot of companies already dont like MS's schedule of releases, and dont like the licensing terms, but the current option set while staying on PC hardware is to go Linux ( which they *should*, but is perceived, with some justification, as being "hard" ).
After Longhorn ships, and compatibility is broken anyway, I'm betting that a large number of people decide to stay close to what they consider home, and chose to use React. Add in no DRM.... Assuming they know about it....
How relevant will all the new Longhorn features be? Does it matter for anyone? What non-MS agenda items does it enable for Joe Company and Joe User?
Think of it as a half-step up to Linux for those of small "computer stature".
emt 377 emt 4
Let's say ReactOS takes a few years to be 100% stable. At that time, Longhorn might have been released. Will people want to have ReactOS as part of their everyday computing experience, bearing in mind that ReactOS would be 10 years behind Longhorn in technology ?
Another point that I would like to raise is that Linux should adopt a subsystem philosophy, like Windows: a POSIX subsystem, a WIN32 subsystem etc. It would be much better than the current situation. Of course this could mean "goodnight simple Unix architecture", "good morning custom kernel architecture".
It sounds like they are trying to reduce dependencies on UNIX in the Wine code. . . . What's the big deal if Wine depends on things in every standard Linux distro?
ReactOS isn't Linux, and so Wine won't run on it if it depends on things in every standard Linux distro. And it isn't a UNIX clone, so UNIX dependencies are a problem.
ReactOS is an attempt at a Windows clone. Rather than rewrite the whole Win32 API from scratch, they decided to use Wine as much as possible. So they're porting Wine to MinGW, and then will clone the bits of Windows necessary to run MinGW. Instant Win32 API layer, so they can concentrate on kernel internals.
I feel like the only one excited about this.
From what I can tell, ReactOS is designed to be anything, with NT as the first main target. I like Linux. I like Windows. I even like BeOS. I love Operating Systems... Playing with them... Watching them grow... I feel like I could design an impressive UI, but I can hardly program yet, so I'm forced to sit and watch hoping an OS gets close to what I'm after so I can focus on the desktop. BeOS shows promise in speed, but it's got a ways to go and no way to get there because it has to make it back to where it already was in an open source suit. Windows is locked down to what Microsoft wants to give you. I can see all sorts of benefits from an open source Windows environment.
First, I imagine that it's easier to write a program for an open source system because you don't have to do as much guesswork. While WinXP seems a lot more stable than previous versions, the non M$ programs that are written for it still manage to crash a lot. M$ has, from what I here, crap for documentation, and it's not as if you could peak through the code yourself to see how best to impliment your desires.
ReactOS really only has a chance as a solution if a lot of people get involved in it. Some people just can't get into the *nix way of doing things. Of course it can be built on top of in such a way that you wouldn't even notice (Mac OS X). I see ReactOS as a programming opportunity more than anything else. Windows doesn't have to suck. If it were open sourced, anyone could put their talents into changing what they want changed. It will never be open sourced. This is the next best thing. ReactOS has the potential to be every OS in one. I'd like to see the ease of Windows drivers (pardon me if I say this out of ignorance because I don't know what system is harder to develope drivers for, only that windows drivers seem easier to employ... or... Linux is getting easier these days and... I really don't know... nevermind.) with the apps I love in Linux and playing with BeOS apps all natively, not to mention the proggies written for Windows that I might actually need.
I'm tired and seem to have missed my thought train, so I think I'll wrap it up.
The best reason to do something is because you can. Realism is boring and rather depressing. There might not be a good reason for what ReactOS is doing when Wine could just be improved upon, but it's too early to tell. I think it's a great idea. When M$ enslaves the net like they're planning I'd like for Linux to be absolutely everything I need in a PC or ReactOS to be up to what XP is now only without all the Proprietary BS, or to be nice and dead so I don't have to feel the pain of what they've done to the future.
Thus ends my rant.
"Some people bitch about apathy, but I don't really care."
- Sin Elemental
I think the question could possibly be turned into:
Will Longhorn be relevant at the time ReactOS 1.0 is released?
I can't even begin to tell you how many developers and companies are currently stuck at Windows 2000, in part because they don't like the "extensions" done to Windows XP. A few that have moved into XP may make that their last Microsoft OS as well. Just because it has the Microsoft logo on the distribution box doesn't mean everybody is going to jump up and down trying to get it.
Keep in mind when Microsoft relesed Windows 2.0 (also called Windows 286... it had other names as well), it almost sank Microsoft as a company. With a huge investment of company resources, it really didn't sell. The same could be said about Windows NT versions 3.5 and earlier. Both of these products didn't have widespread industry support and were in many cases considered jokes because of bugs and other issues they were facing. The fact that MS-DOS version 6 was successful during this time was perhaps the only reason they are still a company now. That Microsoft did turn both product lines around is primarily due to deep pockets and a strong threat from competition that very easily could have kicked Microsoft totally out of the picture.
Issues that put MS in the gravy train with the current round of releases for Windows, keeping competitors out of the picture, simply don't apply to groups like ReactOS. Government agencies are going to stop the "bundling" contracts that gave MS a boost, and giving away the product for free (in typical open source fashion) means they can't underbid, or even buy out ReactOS. An attempt to buy out the ReactOS foundation (if it were possible) would only delay the release of an Open Source Windows-compatable operating system.
Longhorn has some interesting ideas, but many of them are being worked on by the Mono group. Most of the new stuff is dotNet-related. Those that Microsoft decides to push to a monopoly position through patent protection will only wither and die, because it will be obvious the usage terms of it will have (and must have) draconian licensing agreements. No intelligent software manager or CIO type is going to agree to use those software systems except for a few die-hard Microsoft fans, and even that only has a certain amount of momentum.
With Microsoft abandoning Windows '98 (there still is a huge installed base out there of '98 machines) there already is a market for a lean, clean Win32 environment that doesn't require a rewrite of the current software base. Longhorn is only going to be marginally backward compatable (like Windows '95 claimed to be but wasn't) and for the most part is a clean break from their past operating systems. This in part is why it has been delayed so much on release, because it really is essentially a whole new operating system from scratch, not a gradual refinement of previous systems.
I don't know if Microsoft will succeed. If they don't, it means that the world is fed up with the constant upgrades. But they are most likely to suceed, and everybody will want their shiny new toy. My question was in this latter frame then: if Microsoft succeeds and puts out a product that everybody wants, what's the position of ReactOS ?
ReactOS would then become a fork in the development of Windows. That is all. ReactOS is probabaly going to become more and more Linux-like in terms of support for interfaces like GTK or Gnome, allowing Linux drivers, and running open-source applications. Much of this is already written.
As has been discussed elsewhere, ReactOS as an embedded kernel is particularly attractive right now. I need to play with it some more, but there is an embedded system I'm working with right now that I'm trying ot look for a good operating system. The current out-of-the-box view is that we want to use DOS (some flavor... currently we are looking at FreeDOS) because of its simplicity and very small footprint. We are having some problems with suppliers who are willing to let us have SDK environments that support DOS, so a variant of Windows like ReactOS would be fantastic.
I have no doubt that Longhorn (Windows 2005, or whatever they will call it) will be a "commercial success". There are just too many places that are committed either through the MSDN licenses or software assurance to totally ignore this new environment. Miguel de Icaza has spoken extensively about this subject, including postings here on
I think that the OS under Longhorn will be more along the line of the way Windows '95 was on top of MS-DOS 7.0 (it even reported it was 7.0 for versioning), but the majority of applications used the new gee-whiz tools (in this case dotNET) and tended to ignore the old-time software interfaces like the INT 21 protocols in DOS. In fact, I have no doubt that very soon Microsoft will totally abandon the Win32 API, and have told their developers that exactly that is going to happen. This doesn't mean that Win32 applications are going to go away, or that you should not develop a Win32 P.E. file, it is just that Microsoft is no longer going to support files that are compiled using that format.
This switch is already happening, and if you are used to the performance bonuses of native IA32 applications, you should be looking at supporting ReactOS. If you don't mind the performance hit of using CLR and the compiled byte codes of dotNET (which many applications developers, particularly the Quick & Dirty(tm) applications programmers that usually use Windows as an environment this way) are going to migrate to Longhorn. Visual Studio already supports this philosophy, so it should be no surprise.
Now the question is, when the next round of Visual Studio has deliberate bugs in it so applications written in that environment won't run under ReactOS or Mono, will people still buy that compiler suite?
I know that this story is close to being archived, but I thought I'd go ahead and post anyway for some final thoughts.
Are you interested in a totally unique and new OS idea? One thing I've thrown around is a totally object-oriented OS that goes all of the way down to the kernel itself. In a way, this is similar to microkernel, but even more so in the sense that these are actual objects.
Basically, I'd like something like the JVM or dotNet CLR systems, or perhaps more like COM or ORB objects at the kernel level without the ugly overhead. Standard OOP languages like C++, Object Pascal, ect. could be used in this environment. Applications themselves would simply be new objects floating around in the system, and child processes could be easily started and shared between other processes (since they are just simple "pointers" to objects anyway.)
So far, I havn't seen anything but experimental and research OS systems that would exibit this sort of behavior, and usually the OS developers doing something like this get it confused with languages development (like the JVM and Java or dotNet with C#). Also, trying to make a production OS is quite a bit different than a "toy" OS that does a few cool things.
IMHO, this is why creating a whole new OS platform is far from easy. The same can be said about the next generation of AMD CPUs coming out: Can't they come up with a CPU architechture that is not opcode (and even pin-signal in some cases) compatable with the 4004 chip? Do we really need to be backward compatable with 40-year-old CPUs? Unfortunately yes, and the same goes for operating systems. Since so much software was written for Unix systems, it is difficult to ignore what has already been done, and when creating a new OS (like Linux), it is really nice to be able to run existing software (like EMACS or BASH) rather than having to re-invent the whole thing from scratch. In the case of ReactOS, they are trying to leverage existing drivers and developer familiarity with the Win32 API environment. Legacy Windows software is going to be a key component of the success of ReactOS.