ReactOS Revealed

reactosfanboy writes "DRM Hacker Alex Ionescu explained the internals of ReactOS in a recent talk. Ionescu indicates that ReactOS is nearly 100% binary and API compatible with the Windows 2003 kernel, and that they are aiming for full Vista compatibility. Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time." In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally." Here are slides from Ionescu's talk (PDF), which might prove more useful than the video offered in various forms at over 450 MB.

On the contrary...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs ... the Windows emulation seems perfect !

BSOD-OS

[gardyloo]

Ionescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is still not ready for prime time.

Yeah, thank goodness the OS it's modeled after *never* does that.

100% Compatible?

[MachineShedFred]

Not until all the malware works too!

You asked for compatibility...

[jmac1492]

onescu attempted to demonstrate ReactOS but only succeeded in installing it after two BSoDs. This alone should make it clear that ReactOS is ready for prime time."

Fixed.

Wow!

[pushing-robot]

This has inspired me to create a ground-up 100% reimplementation of the AOL client, identical in looks and functionality. Wish me luck!

BARF

[Efialtis]

I just had to wonder, WHY would anyone develop another OS that is "identical" to Windows?

Windows is bad enough...why do it all over again?

You can imagine what the folks in Redmond are ....

[8127972]

Thinking about this:

"In what may be a red flag for Microsoft's lawyers, ReactOS is described as "an environment identical to Windows, both visually and internally.""

People at the Microsoft campus must be moving the furniture out of Ballmer's office as we speak.

Re:Solution to OS Disparity

[Anonymous Coward]

Or combine self-deprecation and blandness to create GAROFFOLO!

ironic

[icepick72]

If ReactOS is almost a Windows clone, but a sub-par one, this begs the question of why do we need ReactOS anyway? Well, to find the answer I went straight to the source reactos.org, but apparently they haven't figured out the answer yet either [reactos.org].

WINE

[Aphex Junkie]

Wine
Is
Not
Enough

brilliant!

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

The official aol client is like being poked in the eye by a sharp planet.

Re:Red flag?

[An ominous Cow art]

it was found that some developers had been exposed to the real Windows source code

I hope they were able to return to society after thorough rehabilitation.

Re:Red flag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Morbid curiosity. Kind of like when you drive past a car wreck.

Re:Link?

[Tenebrarum]

How about a link to ReactOS in the summary?

This time, we don't want to take their website down.

Re:On the contrary...

[ignavus]

Microsoft should ask him how he got the BSOD count down so low.

Re:memory footprint

[Gothmolly]

Absolutely. The addition of CALC.EXE and SOL.EXE are going to bloat it severely.

Re:With no disrespect to the ReactOS developers...

[Handover Phist]

Whereas the Microsoft folk look at it the other way around...

Because ReactOS does it differently

[EmbeddedJanitor]

MS slowdown is caused by thousands of poor lines of code which require countless programmers. ReactOS achieves the same slowdown by just using a few lines of code in slow_down.c:

/* Waste time to look like real Windows */

int i;

for(i = 0; i 1000; i++) {/*spin */}

Wouldn't work

[Tony]

/* Waste time to look like real Windows */

int i;

for(i = 0; i 1000; i++) {/*spin */}

Most decent compilers would optimize that out. The ReactOS team would have to be *much* more clever to achieve the typical MS-Windows slowdown. If they programmed the whole thing in C#, it might just work.