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Russian Univ. Launches Course Based On ReactOS Led By Alex Bragin
New submitter jeditobe writes "Aleksey Bragin reported that starting in February he would be a lecturer at the Moscow State Technical University teaching the operating system course. He said that he intends to incorporate ReactOS into the lab work so that students would have the opportunity to work on an actual operating system. He also intends to translate and upload the slides he will use for class for others to see." (Bragin is the Project Coordinator for ReactOS.)
Why not use Linux or any OS that actually works? ReactOS is terrible.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I'm fed up with the posts "Why not use .." just shut up, ReactOS works and well it is not without bugs and not matured so it's perfect for .. what bugs me more is that an open source develloper turns into Vladimir Putins la(p/b) dog to get funding,
students to get their minds dirty
btw.
Why not use FreeBSD ? the soruce for kernel & userland is extremly well organized within the source tree
and well it's a unix, happy now ?
btww.
Why not use BananaOS instead ?
PRO: ...
a.) it's virtually non existent
b.) the architecture is highly adaptable due to it's virtuallity
c.) the memory footprint is rather low (8 bytes!!)
d.) it can virtually do everything
e.) has a nice gui it appears of the OS tast the user likes!
CON:
it really does only exist in ones mind
I'm assuming by 'work on' he means the actual code of the OS.
Its impossible to do this with Windows, and Linux is already fairly feature complete. Maybe ReactOS has places where it could use some fairly simple code that would at the same time teach the students how to write code for an OS...
This leads to another "usability" question. Why not make a "compatibility standard" that IDEs can provide to users?
Produce an XML spec for describing the supported API features of a given Windows compatibility layer (whether that be Wine, Crossover or ReactOS) that IDEs can simply import to allow developers the option of coding for cross-compatibility in all systems. Ideally it would use RSS to keep up to date with changes.
I import Wine, Crossover and ReactOS and tell my IDE that to warn me if my software won't work on a particular revision of any one of them. Jobs a good un.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
> Its impossible to do this with Windows
If the course is focusing on Windows internals, there's a program called Windows Research Kernel from Microsoft, which some universities can apply to and get access to Windows XP / 2003 kernel source code complete with a build environment. So you can compile it and test any changes. It has the advantage of being bug-free (relative to ReactOS), having well-structured and well-commented code (I've seen it), and it being something that is being used by millions of people out there as production OS.
I had no idea this existed, it is very cool and would make for a good learning experience. If I hadn't already posted I'd mod your post up..
But how about the feeling you'd get if you were a student and the code you wrote or modified actually made it into an OS that you could install and run on your own computer, and that thousands of others would also install and run.. and your teacher is the guy who maintains the project, so you should have a good chance of your code actually making it in.
It has the advantage of being bug-free (relative to ReactOS),
That is actually a disadvantage for an academic OS. When there are obvious problems, there is no need to think much of lab assignments.
Problem is, as system programming goes, Windows is very boring. As you say, it is very stable - but it is also closed-source. Meaning that whatever students implement remains an academic exercise.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
What would Linus do? Do you think, if you were involved in an OS project and you were to teach folks about OSs, you would use some other OS you're not very involved with as a teaching implement?
When my little brother wanted to learn about programming I didn't teach him C or Java or Lisp, or JavaScript, or Perl... I taught him about the LanderScript language, named after our family name. It's one of my toy languages that I created on a whim to teach myself how to write compilers, when I was 11. Why? Because I wanted to teach him how to build programs with logic, and outgrow his 1st language instead of getting deeply mired in the complexites of a full featured language. If he wanted to learn of OS design I'd have taught him with a toy OS of my own creation too.
If the ReactOS course work were going to be beginner stuff I might suggest other simpler OSs first. If the course covers more advanced stuff then it's probably better that the instructor to know all the ins and outs more intimately, so ReactOS would be the optimal choice for him.
How has this not made it onto the internet yet? If this it running on any kind of scale, sooner or later someone is going to sneak the code off on a USB stick and try to make a name for themselves as the activist who stole the Windows code.
Even if reactos were perfectly compatible and entirely bug free, it would still be useless. Who in their right minds wants to use proprietary software and drivers?
Why should a Russian University make their students work with proprietary software from an American company? It's obviously a much better idea to make them work with open-source software, and it's even better if that software is made by Russians.
http://www.haiku-os.org/about
why waste time to teach student how a unix clone works instand of the most used one for personal computers - windows ?
Maybe because none of the machines that make our lifes go on run on Windows? Chances that a CS student will later work in a SecretaryOS only environment are close to zero. With a meaningfull job it's most likely you'll be working with HP-UX, AIX, OpenVMS, z/OS, Unisys mainframes, your various flavours of Linux and possibly BSD. The other big part of professional ecosystems is going the direction of embedded systems. So why on earth would you teach a student on the NT kernel where literally every singly scope or use-case might drastically change with the next iteration of said OS?
Exactly, the only reason you'd do that is, if you knew that NT-clone better than everything else.
An additional feather in their cap if their students and faculty actually jump start the project, and bring it up to a usable level and deliver it to the world.
"Here, have a free version of the most used desktop OS in the world, thanks to the ingenuity of Russian programmers." I've been amazed by their programming skills since the '80s, and I thoroughly believe that if any group of people can bring a fat dose of AMAZING to an OS, the Russians are certainly capable of it.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
I think it's a great idea, and I'd like to see it spread. In particular, I'd like to see there be a lot of project assignments to have working the various parts of ReactOS so that you have a system that is up to date w/ Windows 7. In the past, they had moving targets, be it NT, 2000, XP or 7, but I don't think anybody will argue that there should be a Windows 8 compatible ReactOS.
Have 2 OSs if necessary to map against all the Windows versions that have been there since 1995. Have something like a ReactOS 32 which can use anything from 32MB to 2GB of RAM, and have it support all applications written for win32. That way, everything - Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME and XP will be supported. Then have ReactOS 64 which would require anything from 4GB and let the upper limit of addressable memory be a simple 2^64 B. That way, once written, they won't have to update file systems for a really long while, until they need to go to 128 bit OSs. ReactOS 64 should be made identical to Windows 7, and support anything written for either Vista or Windows 7.
Once it's done, give it a more marketable brand name. ReactOS is terrible.
Maybe because at work, Windows computers are what they've been getting, and will probably continue to get for a while. Understanding its architecture would better prepare them on being MSCEs as well as experts on PCs. Teaching them Linux is only useful if they are going to be Linux developers or sysadmins once they find work. That is hardly the majority of software professionals.
But ReactOS is open sourced. In fact, it is released under GPL, LGPL and BSD licenses.
This project was not done by Microsoft - it was done by a largely, if not exclusively, Russian team. It's very much a 'Russian' OS - more so than Linux or BSD or anything else out there.
Actually, the president in question was Medvedyev, not Putin. Of course, now their roles have switched, until the next election, when they play musical chairs again
ReactOS - yes. That was in response to GP comment that MSFT also makes source of Windows available to the universities. The story was discussed on Slashdot in the past and the source code license has pretty draconian conditions attached.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Responding to your GP post then, what students could do is do exercises on the source code, but any changes they make - sans the original - can be exported to ReactOS, while ensuring that ReactOS doesn't have the same stuff as what XP has.
Why wouldn't they do this on ReactOS directly?
Looking at Windows source for inspiration seems a little dangerous.
You've just said the same thing he did.
On the other hand, WRK is VERY restrictively licensed - you can't do anything really interesting with it. And it's also fairly limited, while ReactOS can now run a Firefox browser.
Win9x support will never happen with an NT kernel.
Additionally for Win9x compatibility it'd crap out somewhere between 512 and 1.5GB of RAM.
Mostly though the win9x period had lots of apps making direct DOS/bios calls even when executed within windows leading to a large plethora of apps that won't run properly on ME nevermind NT kerneled versions of windows.
The irony about this of course is that ReactOS is still stuck using FAT as it's primary filesystem, meaning a focus on Win9x compatibility would actually be more likely to lead to migration than NT (Which ATM would require a reformat for basically anyone who'd be interested in switching, since not only is ntfs the default for NT4/2k+, but it's also the only way to get the benefit of file security that was one of the cornerstones of the 9x->NT migration.)
I'm saying this as someone who's been following the reactos project for at least a dozen years (Maybe more like 15 now.). It's still got the majority of the same user-facing limitations that made it unsuitable for use as a day to day OS ten years ago. And the best part is, it still won't run on a lot of legacy hardware an NT kernel system would (Notably dual proc 440FX workstation hardware) despite it being the reference platform for qemu/bochs/etc.
Unless some of these shortcoming see rapid development, ReactOS is just going to keep falling further and further behind as they change ABIs and APIs to match up with whatever their new 'OS Target' is. Be it NT5.1, NT6, NT6.1 or NT 7.
Check your history. MS Windows source code is available online. A quick search says it's from 2000 and NT4, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Interface_Source_Environment#Source_code_leak
Dude.
I rarely, if ever, had a problem istalling Win9x programs on W2K or WXP
Not for inspiration, but the very opposite - to ensure that they're not using the same code that Microsoft had written
There is the possibility that by teaching students the insides of operating systems with ReactOS they will automatically become reactos developers, maybe that is some of his real intentions :P
Well, from your list of OSs, OpenVMS is dead, z/OS is a server only OS, while the workstations that HP/UX and AIX used to run on are long dead - only their servers survive. Most CS students, unless they are going for PhDs, will be working in companies, and except the OS companies like Red Hat, none of them really run their business on any of the OSs you mentioned. Not even Linux or the BSDs. It's almost always various versions of Windows, depending on how long a company has been holding out. Previously, electronic CAD engineering was done on those Sun and HP workstations, but even that's not true any more.
In fact, given that Intel is pretty much the only surviving game in town, w/ POWER, MIPS and SPARC playing very peripheral roles, it makes even more sense to teach a Windows based OS. People won't be using Minix in their work, or even at home.
That's a leak - not legally released code. If anyone tried building an OS from that, they'd be sued blue by Microsoft. Yeah, there are legal ways to use XP code for teaching purposes, as mentioned above. The advantage of ReactOS here is that students will get a chance to build working parts of the system thereby accelerating its development.
I think the price of the windows source code was a big factor in his decision...