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ReactOS 0.3.1 Released
fireballrus writes with news of the release of ReactOS 0.3.1 — press release, changelog, download packages. ReactOS is "an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003)." The press release notes: "Please don't forget this is an alpha-stage operating system, which means it is not suitable to replace your main OS. Also, this release is aimed to be run mostly in virtualizers / emulators (like QEmu, VMWare, Parallels, etc): because of the big amount of changes, our development team was not able to test/fix all problems which arise when running ReactOS on real hardware."
I've messed with ReactOS on and off for awhile. They really deserve some kudos for what they've accomplished to date, even if the system isn't really usable yet. I strongly encourage you to check them out if you're at all interested in the project; they've done some nice coding to date but can use all the help they can get.
As mentioned, it's perfect to diddle with in a VM environment, though I have loaded it on a dedicated test machine before and that was a lot of fun too.
The legal issues are kinda scary but it looks like they have them under control. All respect to them for attempting the impossible... and from the look of it, they're a good way to succeeding :)
does it run cygwin?
While Microsoft drags their feet with compatibility both with the Justice Dept here in the US and with the European Commission, it's nice to see people working on projects like this which potentially will enhance the interactivity between all platforms. Macs and Linux get along fine but Windows doesn't want to get along with anyone. Maybe ReactOS (being an open source project) will finally force Microsoft compatibility without their consent.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
here: http://www.reactos.org/en/screenshots.html
I wonder if Microsoft has any tricks up their sleeve to deal with these guys. Hidden API functionality perhaps.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Because it is not Free? as in Beer and as in Libre?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
and all the others which can be easily found on this page http://www.shellfront.org/
i know what the goal is of ReactOS, to create an open-source free Windows alike os
and they are obviously doing an incredible job, they are kinda reverse-engineering windows if i can call it that
but ILuvRamen i really don't understand what you're saying, please explain
Comment removed based on user account deletion
because this way we have a tiny squishy portal we can use to host windows only programs personally i would like to see the EU force Microsoft to write enough docs and blank off the patents so that reactOS could become a drop in replacement for XP .
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
It would be interesting to compare Reactos' interpretation of Alpha vs Microsoft's. What's the BSOD rate?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...and that when or if it should ever reach beta (or, god forbid, release) stage it will be sued back into oblivion by Microsoft for an almost infinate number software patent violations.
I mean, come on guys...you know it's going to happen, it's just a matter of time. Why not invest your time and money into something that isn't litigation-bait?
Well it would be interesting to see if the effort allows them to fix some of the flaws and continue to run a lot of the software. For me personally I look at this sort of an effort as a perfect solution to the main thing that keeps me from ditching MS: games.
The only reason why a lot of us would upgrade to Vista is because Microsoft will stop supporting our current OS with bug fixes and security updates. Vista to me looks like a nightmare of DRM and restrictions on what I would want to do, but I can see my current Win 2K install becoming as outdated and unsupported as Windows 98.
If React OS can keep me running my current Windows apps in a sensible, secure, and supported environment, then I can avoid Vista. That means less headaches, and less expense.
Really, these folks may have found a really nice niche.
(Honestly, looking at Vista make me think that this is the time when someone, whether Linux, Mac, or something else, could make significant inroads.)
Three Squirrels
Because most applications that people use are written for Windows.
Once you give people other options for running those apps, that aren't controlled by a company trying to protect their monopoly, you open up a lot of possibilities for the industry to move away from Microsoft lock-in.
By the time the OS will be anywhere near usable and a "drop-in-replacement" for Windows XP, WinXP will no longer be supported by M$ and there will have been the next 5 releases of windows out. Really why not just focus on getting windows programs to run on other OS'es like using wine on linux. A lot of programs already can be run with wine or crossover office and I'm sure Linux has lots of other great programs which can replace many of the programs which people would want to use ReactOS to run anyway. Or focus on the next generation of windows programs using .Net using mono.
The only thing I'd really love to see is a way of using windows drivers under linux. I have a feeling that it is a very difficult thing to do though otherwise I'm sure it would have been done by now.
because
a) there are no patents (yet*) in Europe, so we can still use it.
b) the more small targets MS has, the more difficult it will be for them to cause real damage before we get the law changed to stop their suits and close them down
c) we can learn much abou the Windows API which only real study can teach us. This will be useful in anti-trust lawsuits if nothing else
* http://ffii.org/
So it won't run (or at least won't run well) on actual hardware, so that's the driver issue nullified. I'm not running ReactOS for the drivers, it's running with virtualisation under my already free OS. So I'm running it so i can run Windows programs under my free OS? Why not use WINE? Or push for some standards compliant software that produces results under any operating system? Of course, business situations may require some specific proprietary software, so why not use the specific, proprietary OS?
I try to use only free software, but if I had to use some software under Windows, I'd run Windows. Creating an alpha environment to run proprietary software just seems wrong.
What if, as it becomes closer to a release product, it becomes decentralized. Anyone who had done enough work on the original ReactOS walks away from the project perhaps with a public request not to use their work. What if there is no one person or entity to sue? Patches could be written for specific issues by the user community, so support would be distributed as well. Basically, is there a way to spread the legal vulnerability/liability between so many people, that MicroSoft would have to resort to suing thousands of individuals for very small amounts, with a limited chance of success in each case?
We are all just people.
a) by the time ReactOS is usable, there will be. Also, american law is enforcable overseas; cf AllOfMp3 closure and The Pirate Bay raids.
b) you're assuming that they'll be acting alone; they have novell's help on the Linux front, and slapping a Cease-And-Desist on ReactOS would be trivial.
c)the only thing useable in an antitrust suit would be the undocumented apis...which have nothing to do with ReactOS. Anything done in ReactOS can easily be found and studied via MSDN.
No one has ever gone after MS's meat and potatoes before. Also, what do you think MS is preparing to do with all the patent noise over "linux IP violations"?
Hide your heads in the sand all you want to...it's your time you're wasting, not mine.
Maybe these people will be able to get jobs as system programmers as a result of this. Maybe they want to see how far they can go before they get sued. Maybe they are hoping that by the time this get to that point the world will be more reverse engineer friendly. Maybe this is just civil disobedience.
In the 70's and 80's UNIX was a product developed by a big company, the phone company to be precise. it has since become an idea replicated many times, always poorly, sometimes less poorly than K&R's implementation. Why can't that happen to windows?
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
my understanding is that their compatibility with win32 is largely based on wine, and so it has most of the same bugs running win32, and then some.
What I'd really like to see is some major company getting behind reactos and wine. Getting a portable win32 layer really working to the point where it's no longer just a toy is going to take a major effort, more of an effort than the open source community seems willing to put forward at this time. Working win32 is a real possibility, but it needs a lot of people to get behind it.
b) you're assuming that they'll be acting alone; they have novell's help on the Linux front, and slapping a Cease-And-Desist on ReactOS would be trivial.
c)the only thing useable in an antitrust suit would be the undocumented apis...which have nothing to do with ReactOS. Anything done in ReactOS can easily be found and studied via MSDN. a) thepiratebay and AllOfMP3 are up and running RIGHT now, it may have influence on political decisions(which Visa/Mastercard banning allofmp3 and thepiratebay raid both where), but its not enfoceable unless they hold the same law.
b) A Cease-and-Desist order is always trivial, all it is is an official statement saying stop or I'm gonna sue you. It's a form, that's it.
c) MSDN CAN be concidered insider knowledge and therefore not able to be used in reverse engineering of the software just as a leak in source code would be illegal to be used inside a clone software or even for studying the original.
Having said that....
Reverse-Engineering is protected under law so unless microsoft can prove they are using leaked NT source code the actual reversing is prefectly legal. The thing that scares me is the trivial things that I'm almost cirtain M$ has copyright on such as the [Start] Menu, they could have picked any other name then Start for it but kept it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
IIRC, they've actively tried to limit the usage of copyrighted strings to only places where it's technically infeasible to not use them. Places like the registry have to have data in places like /Microsoft/Windows are examples.
And, if I recall a case involving Nintendo and.. Galoob(?) correctly, a simple copyrighted string cannot be used as access control. I'm not absolutely sure it would apply here, but it seems like a workable defense.
Of course... Microsoft made a new driver system and API for Vista, which could be considered a force in the opposite direction, as things written specifically for Vista are not cited as being compatible with ReactOS.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I've been running this in a virtual machine on Windows and haven't seen anyx938U#Jklx j *** NO CARRIER *** Well, I guess I was wrong. At least Windows allowed me to save what I had previously typed, and Windows is so stable tha83jkJKLEv &#j3kR *** NO CARRIER ***
Why? Such wasted effort to duplicate a flawed system of software.
Just like Linux was, you mean ?
Joint and several liability. Anyone they find can be sued for the whole weight of damages.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Bigger company behind ReactOS would just make a bigger, juicier target. Not gonna happen.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
The comparison between Apple and IBM is simply not valid. Franklin didn't simply reverse engineer the Apple computer. They copied Apple's design down to the individual electrons. The BIOS and OS was simply stolen from Apple. There was even several places in the Franklin's ROM and in the OS where the string "Copyrighted by Apple Computer" was there for all to see. Even Franklin had to admit they copied the ROM and OS. Franklin tried to use the argument that since the OS and ROM was not in a readable form, it was not copyrightable. They lost on appeal.
Phoenix, on the other hand, carefully documented their reverse engineering efforts. They had a clean room, developers who never saw the IBM BIOS source, and showed how they tested for compatibility. The BIOS IO was well documented and was fairly simple with a very limited number of routines (not to underestimate the challenge of reverse engineering it, but it was simple enough that Phoenix thought it was possible to even undertake the task). The resulting BIOS clone was register compatible, but not source compatible.
The rest of the IBM PC was off the shelf parts, so once the BIOS was cracked, producing IBM PCs clones was a cinch. Later on, IBM attempted to kill the clone market by coming out with the Microbus architecture. The Microbus was copyrightable, so other manufacturers would be unable to produce clones of IBM's newest PCs. However, by that time, IBM no longer dominated the PC market, and other manufactures simply produced their own 32 bit architecture machine. By then, "clones" were no longer clones.
Wouldn't it be nice is ReactOs got to a stage where it could Embrace, Extend and Extinguish the NT line? Oh well, just a fantasy.
GLORX 3:16
As a note here, one of the reasons for the Microsoft "Shared Assurance" program that locks you into their grips is to prevent people from trying to install "free upgrade" and other stuff from the Microsoft.com website. There are not nearly as many "free downloads" from there as there were even a few years ago. And those that there are require you to use your OS registration key (in an innocent name called a "passport") or some other similar feature to verify that you are a genuine MS customer.
This was not done at all ten year ago, when ReactOS could barely boot at all, and that was considered a major accomplishment.
I would say that while Microsoft is not running for the hills with their tail between their legs, they are not ignoring ReactOS either. I would even argue that the move with Vista to a new API was due in part to their attempt to relegate ReactOS to the dustheap of ancient and unsupported operating systems.
Where ReactOS is going to be a "killer app" is when Microsoft finally decides to stop supporting Windows 2000. There will be a huge need for many businesses to keep some legacy applications running on new hardware (due to the old stuff simply having mechanical failures) but they can't upgrade to XP (or Vista) for various reasons. ReactOS would certainly be something for companies considering this as a potential migration path, where continued OS support will occur.
Seeing them plug ahead is one thing, donating to help them plug ahead is another. http://www.reactos.org/en/fundraising_campaign_don ate.html
I feel the same way.
But you'd still have to run Microsoft's DirectX and I wonder if that will ever run on ReactOS. Also, since they aim for compatibility with XP, it'll never run DirectX 10...
http://www.reactos.org/media/screenshots/2007/ros_ 031_cpuz.jpg
This screenshot shows PII Processor with clock core running at 2410.9 MHz
Is that really possible. Something just doesn't seem right here
I've written a boot sector and a hello world kernel, so I can begin to appreciate how much work it is to get an OS to the point where you can port Wine to it. I'm shocked at the way you make it sound trivial.
ReactOS already works with many Windows drivers, like nVidia's graphics drivers, and runs about as many apps as Wine, including Firefox. You can't seriously call that "not do[ing] anything real in a VM".
Either you don't know what you're talking about, you're a troll, you jumped to conclusions before getting any info about ReactOS, or all of the above.
Why not just go with the approach of giving a daily fine, like the EU wants, until they open up their stuff?
And, to make there be some *real* incentive their, force them to make these fines payable directly to a foundation that essentially acts to fund ReactOS and WINE development?
That'd be a bitter pill to swallow, and a win-win situation for everyone else.
1) Umm, that killer app must also run in Windows, or it's a bug in ReactOS (since they're trying to recreate Windows), no?
2) Windows 2000+ does have a Unix compat subsystem. It seems more NetBSD than Linux (uses pkg_add etc, NetBSD has Interix packages that you can use), and no X server just libs. I have no idea if they also emulate fork() or not though.
Patent 6,379,553: Method to Display Failure Information ...
A method and system are provided for displaying failure information on a limited resource computing device. Unparseable textual messages are displayed upon failure.
4. The method of claim 3, in which the screen is blanked before the message is displayed.
5. The method of claim 4, in which the message is displayed on a blue background.
---
As you see, React cannot legally implement the Blue Screen of Death.
Yeah well, humor and legal comments are not very compatible with each other!
So probably the parent poster should have said that the 'blue screen of death' patent idea was a joke. On the USPTO website, patent 6,379,553 isn't even about computing:--
"United States Patent 6,379,553 -- Hogrefe April 30, 2002
Polymerase enhancing factor (PEF) extracts, PEF protein complexes, isolated PEF proteins, and methods for purifying and identifying same"
-wb-
You are an idiot. Please get some help. What is MORE GEEKY than a homespun OS trying to emulate the Windows API? Not only were your assumptions wrong. I wrote my first bootable stub/kernel when you were probably still suckling on your mamma's tit.
It's interesting to see that someone is working on a free Windows clone rather than a Unix clone. What they have managed to develop till now seems pretty impressive. If they can churn out a beta release in the next couple of years, Microsoft is definitely going to have some competition (no matter how small it is). Unless of course they decide to sell themselves to M$ by that time or M$ forces to shut them down.
You're partly wrong about Franklin. Their initial machines (I saw one ... it was in a cardboard enclosure, for chrissakes) was indeed a knockoff as you say. The model I saw even said "Apple ][" on the top of the display during bootup. But Franklin redesigned the mainboard and the enclosure and wrote their own BIOS (actually, "Monitor ROM"), improving on the design with a substantially better keyboard (something Apple refused to do until the //e came out, and I'm not counting the Apple ///.)
//e and the original PC ... they aren't all that complicated.) Cloning the BIOS wasn't the trick ... making it legal was. And IBM's firmware design made that much easier.
The problem with ripping off the Apple's Monitor ROM was that direct function calls to specific ROM addresses were required: there was no indirection. Consequently, while Franklin's rewrite was a masterful effort there was a neverending stream of compatibility issues and ROM updates.
IBM, on the other hand, did a much better job with the original PC BIOS by using software interrupts: it didn't matter where a particular handler was located in memory because there was a pointer to it in the vector table. Writing a clone BIOS was a piece of cake in comparison, hell, you could even run an entire BIOS in RAM (I've done that) or replace specific ROM code with a RAM equivalent. As long as you didn't rip off any of IBM's original code, and could show that the developers weren't tainted, you were gold. The development task itself was straightforward (I still have the annotated BIOS listings for both Apple ][,
In any event, I still maintain that had IBM really been interested in stopping the clones they could have done it. Apple certainly has managed to keep clones at bay, and I can't believe that IBM's legal team couldn't have done just as good a job against the likes of Compaq if they'd really wanted to do so.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
One word: Appletalk.
Grrrr....
And another one:
Trumpet Winsocket
Grrrrr....
MS and Apple were dragged into open standards screaming against their will.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
With patent law you can claim somebody is making red nibblets just by convincing a jury (that knows close to nothing about nibblets, specially the red ones) that it is so.
You don't have to show the nibblet machine or ask the nibblet code to be shown.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm pretty sure that they would support DirectX 10 if they can get everything else in the pipeline working. If you look around the ReactOS site and read the forums, I think there are posts to the effect.
Of course, if you pardon my pessimism I think the chances that a volunteer project will cleanly reverse engineer even the vast majority of Windows 2000 is rather small. I wish them the best, but they're tackling an enormous task.
The hardware manufacturing sector will not be able to make a better IBM computer than IBM. At most, they're likely to make a better PS/2 sometime in the next 3-5 years. By this point, IBM will be well ahead. I think we need to put this into perspective-this project will be a welcome way for IBM clone companies to preserve LEGACY IBM hardware support in clones at decent speed, etc... Otherwise, this is not going to be adopted by the masses... EVER. If you think this, then you really don't understand the consumer market.
—
Seriously, there are plenty of cases where a company or organization has made a better (and highly successful!) mousetrap than the original. Look at what AMD is doing to Intel, or what Firefox is doing to Internet Explorer. I think it's naive to think say that it's impossible for anyone to make a better Windows than Microsoft.
Plus, when you think about it, no one really has to. What exactly is going to run on Windows Vista, for example, that doesn't run on Windows XP? 99.9% of everything that everyone uses on Windows will actually still run on Windows 2000. If they're successful in cloning Windows XP (which is their goal), they don't have to keep up with Microsoft. Hell, I'll actually be pleased if they don't; not cloning UAC is more than fine with me!
you mentioned most of the things that I was going to say to that guy.
As a side note, I believe that ndis is actually based on reactos' driver code.