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.

Link?

[russint]

How about a link to ReactOS [reactos.org] in the summary?

With no disrespect to the ReactOS developers...

[EvanED]

They might want to look up what "identical" means. There is still a very long way [oregontel.com] to go [reactos.org]. (I could have put a traditional screenshot up there too, from W2K or even W95, and it would still be true.)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:BARF

[Pantero Blanco]

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?

So you won't have to actually run Windows in order to run Windows programs such as Photoshop, AutoCAD, and most video games. WINE isn't good enough for everyone.

FUD - ReactOs is legal

[N3wsByt3]

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

Oh, please... While I have no doubts MS will try to destroy ReactOs when it becomes too popular, the developers have made painstakingly difficult steps to ensure the proper reverse engineering is done ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box_testing [wikipedia.org] ). They can sue all they want, they can't win this. (They can however make it an expensive legal wrangling...but then again, since it's open source, it's difficult to imagine any single lawsuit will be able to end the project).

slides unavailable

[mrbobjoe]

But you can see them here: http://www.alex-ionescu.com.nyud.net:8080/wloo-tal k.pdf [nyud.net]

Re:Red flag?

[despisethesun]

No. As others have pointed out, they did a thorough audit to make sure ReactOS wasn't tainted. Much of the project's source is actually derived from WINE (though with many differences, since ReactOS is an OS and not a compatibility layer), and last I heard the two projects have a friendly relationship and source and documentation goes back and forth between them wherever it can be helpful.

Re:memory footprint

[Anonymous Coward]

The zipped vmware image is 19 megs. So I'd say its a bit lighter ..

Facts badly wrong in parent, mod down

[Anonymous Coward]

The incident had nothing to do with Windows source and it was certainly not minor. It was due to certain parts having been implemented by the same programmer that had reverse-engineered them and was consequently "tainted" if the project was to adhere to its principle of black box testing only. That programmer was the very same Ionescu as here. The result of the unfortunate incident was that the programmer that found out about it (Hartmut IIRC) resigned from the project and the audit that is still going on was started. I read some of the discussion about it on the mailing list and apparently there was a great deal of concern about Ionescu's contributions since they came too quickly and were too good to be the result of just blax box testing (but not all is available for everyone so there could've been something else as well that resulted in the conflict between programmers - the whole project was to some extent in jeopardy, though). The only thing you're right about is that they take copyright infringement seriously but that has nothing to do with that incident.

mimicking bill gates w/ win98

[Frogg]

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.

hey, that sounds mighty familiar... [google.com]

Re:Red flag?

[Richard_at_work]

Actually what happened was someone alledged that someone on the development team had decompiled actual MS Windows dll and binary files, and included the resulting code into the ReactOS codebase.

Re:BARF

[LiENUS]

Unfortunately for the most part ReactOS is just wine that self boots. They borrow heavily from the wine codebase for their win32 api compatibility. Naturally the driver compatibility doesn't borrow from the wine codebase. The real point of ReactOS isn't software compatibility but environment compatibility. The goal is to be able to install all your windows apps on a machine that only supports windows (due to poor ACPI support in linux or poor video driver support or any of a number of incompatibilities). However windows application compatibility is rarely if ever better than wine with reactos.

Re:Doubt microsoft would care

[BorgDrone]

WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one.

From the linked PDF:

Wine makes up the bulk of ReactOS'sWin32 Libraries, which are mostly left untouched.

Drivers

[tepples]

Windows is not nearly as unstable as the FUDDERS would like to make it seem.

As I understand it, instability in Windows operating systems comes largely from defects in drivers, such as the VxDs of Windows 9x [wikipedia.org]. The new Windows Driver Foundation framework [wikipedia.org], introduced with Windows Vista, attempts to contain these issues by providing a well-behaved abstract base class that other drivers can extend and by putting some drivers into user space. Under Linux, most of the drivers are Free and subject to the same scrutiny by the proverbial many eyes as the rest of the kernel.

Re:ironic

[julesh]

Application Compatibility - Wine can never offer as much compatibility as ReactOS. Since ReactOS actually shares Wine's code base, it is highly unlikely that ReactOS will have significantly better compatibility than Wine.

Not true. ReactOS uses some of Wine's codebase, but many key areas (window management, memory management, thread support, etc.) are rewritten from scratch to be more compatible with Windows own implementations of these. I've seen Wine fail to run applications before because of some subtle difference in how Linux handles these tasks to Windows. ReactOS can eliminate these issues.

Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested.

Yes. Unfortunately NdisWrapper doesn't really work very well (my limited experiments suggest only about half of the cards out there work with it), CaptiveFS is slow, and no other projects have produced useful results in this field. This is because running a Windows device driver without a Windows kernel is quite tricky. NDIS drivers are a simpler problem: NDIS was originally developed to be an open, cross-platform specification by 3Com. MS have embraced & extended it since then, but at its heart it is still much more portable than many other driver types used by Windows.

There is also the huge issue of using binary drivers in an open source kernel. It still hasn't been settled whether or not this is ultimately a good or bad thing. However, it is generally accepted that open source drivers are much better than binary, and ReactOS would provide absolutely no motivation for hardware vendors to ever open their drivers, or even to target ReactOS as a platform.

Frankly, there are a lot of us who have become fed up waiting for working open source drivers for our hardware and would rather just plug a black box in and be done with it.

Also, if one desired you could rework something like KDE to be VERY similar to Windows, I believe that there are already distro's who try to do this (such as Linspire). There are still differences, but not really significantly more than between Win 98 & XP.

Actually, there are very substantial differences that can be deeply annoying because they're about the way the basic system works. Details like which control panel applet you use to start or stop services (e.g.) aren't as annoying (to me) as the lack of feedback when a program is starting (KDE does have some feedback, but it doesn't show if the program wasn't started from the window manager, whereas Windows will show it however you start your program). This can't be fixed easily in Linux: it needs the kernel to provide feedback to the window manager to inform it when a graphical subsystem program is in the process of starting up. Linux doesn't have such a thing as a graphical subsystem program, and the window manager is not a special process that could easily receive such feedback from the kernel.

I think a lot of people have missed the real point of ReactOS. Including the developers, by all appearances. Windows won't run under Xen paravirtualization. There's no reason ReactOS couldn't be ported to it, however.

Re:Doubt microsoft would care

[Shawn is an Asshole]

There is work [reactos.org] towards Xen support. Though, Xen doesn't provide a GUI like VMWare or even Qemu so you'd have to run something like VNC to get the display.

Re:FUD - ReactOs is legal

[RLiegh]

They don't have to get a ruling. They can shut it down for the duration of the trail and make it effectively illegal to host or distribute in any country where the US has any economic influence. That's the US, Austrailia, India and Europe, and parts of Asia

Good luck hosting the project in timbuktu.

Re:WTF???

[Stewie241]

But then how is that:
we have VMware, we have 2007, we have everything necessary to run Windows programs without running Windows.

Pls post instructions on how to run Windows without Windows using VMWare. thx.

Not saying that is a bad solution, but that still doesn't allow you to run Windows programs without windows.

Windows with snapshots is still Windows.

A link to the discussion?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you referring to this discussion:

http://www.reactos.org/archives/public/ros-dev/200 6-January/007393.html [reactos.org]

Here's a quote from one of the messages about the standard policy, which helps to put the discussion in perspective:

">From Section C of the ReactOS IP Statement (C. Copyrights of Others) ....Any source code produced by direct reverse engineering should be treated in exactly the same way as any other non-free source code useful for study and understanding of the system, but not permitted for inclusion in ReactOS."

Re:Identical?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fonts Windows uses are copyrighted by Microsoft and you can only get them when you purchase either a Microsoft OS or Office for Mac.

They're called the Microsoft TrueType Core Fonts and its one of the key points that non-technical Windows users have when they use Linux. (Their imported Word documents don't look right.) There are quasi-legal (legality depends on your country) packages for Linux distros to mitigate this, but no distro includes them by default.

Obviously, this also applies to ReactOS.

While I personally dislike SuSe, especially since Novell took them over, one thing they have gotten right is to include open fonts for serif, sans-serif, and monospacing where each letter has the same horizontal proportions as those of Times New Roman (serif), Arial (sans-serif), and Courier New (monospacing) so at least applications run in WINE don't run into issues as shown in the screenshots above, even if it still leaves the applications looking off. I wish Ubuntu (and ReactOS) would do the same.