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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."
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.
It's a fast cpu-emulator with JIT compilation and such. About 100 times faster than bochs.
QEMU
This is just NOT true. It's revisionist history. However, the nice thing about the web, is that the original article written by the first person outside MS to discover the code is still online.
This is what's known by historians as a primary source.
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
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.
I think you miss the point. By using ReactOS, you cut out the software bloat that MS throws in, and you can pare down the kernel to the bare elements. ReactOS allows you to work at a command-prompt only level, so if you have an application like a server or embedded controller that doesn't need a GUI, ReactOS is perfect. While I don't think this is a deliberate goal of this project, it would not be all that difficult to make a single floppy version of ReactOS, like QNX has done.
The really nice thing about this is if you have components you are adding to an embedded system, and the manufacturer has Windows device drivers, ReactOS will recognize them and they don't even need to be recompiled. This opens up a whole range of equipment options that would not normally be available under embedded Linux (although most embedded equipment companies are supporting Linux now... this wasn't always the case).
I don't know what is cheaper than free software, and the point here is that this increases flexability. I don't know about what you mean with hardware requirement, but I don't see too many 386 CPUs anymore, even among embedded systems. ReactOS will run on most of the common CPU systems found in embedded systems, particularly if you are already looking at a Linux-based system as well. This is an option, not a requirement.
If you are talking about using the Microsoft version of the NT 4.0 kernel in an embedded system, I would have to totally agree it is a mistake. I would still be careful about the "uneducated developers" you are thowing stones at, because there is a huge difference between the NT kernel and Windows CE (which truly is for the clueless developers). On raw technical merits, I would stand behind an NT-based kernel as much if not more than a unix-based kernel (like Linux).