ReactOS 0.3 RC1 Released

ajdlinux writes "A few days ago ReactOS 0.3 RC1 was released! After a long 6 months without a release this seems good! The ReactOS team has also started a software compatibility list for programs that are ReactOS-compatible. AFAIK the documentation and wiki hasn't yet been updated, but it should be soon. Go get it and try it out!"

Comments

Re:Auditing...

[Ekhymosis]

I agree. The project manager took good initiative to stop everything to audit the code to cover their asses. We don't need tainted code in OSS, especially not when it is inside a very promising project. I do hope they achieve their goals, especially to show that it CAN be done WITHOUT copying. Let's just hope Ballmer and his thugs don't get trigger happy with their bs ip stuff. Good luck to the ReactOS crew, I commend you for bearing this grueling audit and legal pratter that major companies like to threaten OSS community coders with.

ReactOS is a Windows compatible OS

[Pigeon451]

For those who have never heard of it and thought "YAY another Linux distro" (like me), it's a Windows compatible OS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS

OMG this is SO Windows

[giorgiofr]

First thing it did was BLUE SCREEN on me. Oh teh hilarity! I am not kidding, look here: http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/8862/reactos5ba .png

Important even if you don't run Windows

[Kadin2048]

Even if you run Linux, ReactOS is a project worth paying attention to.

Right now we have Wine (or Cedega, if you prefer) if you want to run Windows applications on Linux. However, what's always intrigued me about ReactOS is the possibility of using it as the client OS on a virtual machine. I think this has certain advantages over Wine (sandboxing, greater application compatibility), and removes the biggest disincentive to Windows virtualization -- the requirement of purchasing a Windows license.

Also, because it's open source, it seems like it would be easier to get ReactOS working as a client OS on a paravirtualized system like Xen without having to use things like Vanderpool/Pacifica or accept the performance penalties of VMware. That, to me seems very cool: I could be running a Linux system as the server/Domain-zero OS, and then have multiple paravirtualized, Windows-compatible clients running on it, at full speed, without having to purchase any licenses or being dependent on any specialized virtualization hardware.

there's a better way: Terminal Server capability

[lkcl]

there's an even better way to make ReactOS incredibly useful: add in terminal server capability.
then once you have a server running in the [virtual-]machine of your choice, you can then run rdesktop or other thin client to connect to it.

here's the thing: the original developers of NT 3.1 were _not_ going to add a GUI: they planned it as a DOS-like (actually VMS-like) "thing" - and were told "from on high" to get it "windowsey". what make ReactOS so interesting is that such a goal could ultimately be achieved - making it much easier to virtualise because you wouldn't need a full desktop environment in the virtual machine: just a command prompt.

the difficulty with putting ReactOS into a virtual machine like XEN - which is a hybrid VM architecture - is that you need to rewrite your HAL (hardware abstraction layer) to fit on top of XEN, not to fit on top of "real" hardware.

here's the real kicker about that: once you _have_ written a XEN-HAL for ReactOS - with complete source code available to you - there exists a strong possibility of being able to "drop in" those .SYS and .DLL components _directly_ into Windows NT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows XP) and actually have it work.