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."

Cool project

[26199]

The legal issues are kinda scary but it looks like they have them under control [reactos.org]. All respect to them for attempting the impossible... and from the look of it, they're a good way to succeeding :)

Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

here: http://www.reactos.org/en/screenshots.html [reactos.org]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Nice to see them plugging ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

WINE on Linux runs virtually every Windows program I've tried.

You must not have tried many Windows programs. I'm usually more surprised when something somewhat works. To even get to that point it takes considerable tweaking. Crossover acceptably when using supported applications, but if you stray from that it's little better than Wine.

Re:Nice to see them plugging ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of. I've run earlier versions under QEmu on my G4 iBook.

Re:Nice to see them plugging ahead

[uhlume]

And PPC? Are you serious? There's a PPC port of Windows? I don't think so. Maybe someone in Microsoft was dreaming of it, but I don't think this 'port' ever got anywhere.

How old are you, twelve? Just because your memory doesn't reach back that far, doesn't mean it never happened: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_ platforms [wikipedia.org]

(Also, as noted in the linked article, what do you suppose the Xbox360 runs on?)

Re:I'm not trolling

[ZwJGR]

The WINE project is for creating a windows emulator for Linux

WINE
IS
NOT an
Emulator

WINE is an API wrapper layer, not a processor achitecture substitute, hence the code needs to be written for the same chipset as the machine (means x86 in most cases) and there isn't a virtual performance penalty (no pun intended).