ReactOS Revealed 280
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... (Score:5, Funny)
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Windows is not nearly as unstable as the FUDDERS would like to make it seem.
Re:On the contrary... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would almost agree with you, if only looking at a snapshot from about 2002 until 2006 during which I was no longer dealing with 9x and NT4 installations. Installation headaches were pretty commonplace prior to these years. Once hardware vendors had all gotten used to the ways of NT5, installing Win2K and XP became a total breeze. Rarely have I had trouble installing either operating system. They will choke occasionally on cheap and/or new hardware, but with typical stuff installation is usually a no-brainer.
And now Vista is upon us, and it's not detecting a lot of real obscure hardware, like say, MY CDROM DRIVE. WTF. Once again it's become hit and miss...or would be, if I chose to install Vista in production at this time.
Difficulty installing an OS isn't really a good measure of quality anyhow. I recently had a bad experience installing Ubuntu 6.05LTS to an array on an adaptec I2O controller. Rock solid once I got it fixed. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
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That's highly misleading - going by release dates, Windows 2000 was released in 2000, and Vista in 2007, giving us 7 years (presumably the OP was talking about when he had to deal with them, which includes beta releases and people still using an old version).
That's the same timeframe which Mac OS has only offered a stable OS (things like memory protection), in the form of OS X.
Of course
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Hundreds of installs? You mean in an IT environment with mainly smiler hardware doing a standard install? If you don't then you must be the worlds richest home user to own that many machines.
People who have to re-install often because windows is fundamentally unstable when its being asked to do a lot *do* tend to have problems. Gamers do find they have to re-install more often I find, but then they are pounding their machines a lot.
My IT experience was heavily concerned wi
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Protocol requires that I leap to the wrong conclusion immediately and rant on about that whilst also having a go at Microsoft.
Do you know nothing?
Drivers (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Of course not, but you're still one lucky bastard.
Sure, win2k was a huge step up (well, after SP2, anyway). But don't kid yourself into thinking it crashed less than previous versions, it's just that it didn't tend to fubar your data up when it did. You can talk all you want about how much more reliable its become (true), but that still doesn't change the fact that I've lost entire days of my life troubleshooting some rando
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Did you forget to activate it? See http://reactosgenuineadvantage.com/ [reactosgen...antage.com] for details.
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BSOD-OS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:BSOD-OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the limited resources of the ReactOS team it's not even that bad. Even Microsoft had (serious) issues with pretty much every new Windows version presentation.
Because ReactOS does it differently (Score:5, Funny)
/* Waste time to look like real Windows */
int i;
for(i = 0; i 1000; i++) {/*spin */}
Wouldn't work (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Link? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Link? (Score:4, Funny)
This time, we don't want to take their website down.
Doubt microsoft would care (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doubt microsoft would care (Score:4, Interesting)
ReactOS would be useful for companies looking for a way to move off of Windows but who have binaries that only run on Windows. Due to the proliferation of VM technology, a VM running ReactOS on top of your OS of choice could make migration away from Windows cheap enough to be an option. If ReactOS is cheap enough, it could displace Windows by itself for limited applications. A free OS Dell or someone can install that still lets them get paid for crapware and which still lets end users run games and junk software from Walmart could easily grab market share away from Windows. Anything that threatens MS's dominance with Windows, whether it detracts from Linux or your favorite OS or not, is good for motivating MS to make Windows better. If Windows is as good as other OS's, I don't care if it is dominant as much.
Re:Doubt microsoft would care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doubt microsoft would care (Score:5, Interesting)
WINE is an incomplete re-implementation of the Windows APIs, while ReactOS aims to be a complete one. I don't have any real confidence that WINE will ever work reliably for arbitrary software. It is a nice crutch for specific, common applications. It is a reasonable route to building a quick and dirty port. I don't think it will ever fill the role of a method of moving away from Windows and still running random (often proprietary or outdated) applications.
That is pretty much what I am doing now, except most WinXP licenses are not portable to new hardware and such a move is often accompanied by a move to new hardware. ReactOS is likely to be more lightweight than the current version of Windows and less likely to cause headaches with licensing and registration and DRM shutting it down arbitrarily. It also would have save my company a hundred bucks a license and that adds up.
I actually looked at WINE and a couple of commercial WINE-based offerings and ReactOS before I chose to run WinXP in a VM. It was the most expensive solution by far (other than Windows outside a VM) but the only one that worked. In future I could see going either way, but I think the overhead from ReactOS is likely going to end up less of a consideration that the necessarily limited range of WINE.
Re:Doubt microsoft would care (Score:4, Informative)
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One key advantage to ReactOS in this scenario is that with a little hacking it could be made to run under Xen's paravirtualization system, which is apparently rather more efficient than full virtualization (as is currently required in order to run Windows).
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100% Compatible? (Score:4, Funny)
With no disrespect to the ReactOS developers... (Score:2, Informative)
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I know plenty of people who use the "Windows Classic" skin on XP, because that's what they're used to.
When MS updates its software, there are two types of changes, with different audiences: minor to moderate performance/security upgrades (which require most people to upgrade in order to still communicate with each other, i.e. MSO), and major interface upgrades, to cater to the magpies that will only buy the new version if it is shinier than the previous one.
Unfortunately, th
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I use the classic skin on XP because Luna looks like something an intern slapped together in a week. I don't at home, because I have XP media center, and the skin on that actually looks halfway decent.
Aero gives us the strangest window metaphor yet: the frame is translucent, and the window pane itself is opaque. Joy.
(And no, I'm not really into OSX's unsubtle gaudy lickable widgets either)
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Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Most accurate description until now (Score:2)
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BARF (Score:2, Funny)
Windows is bad enough...why do it all over again?
Re:BARF (Score:5, Informative)
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.
WINE (Score:5, Funny)
Is
Not
Enough
brilliant!
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So instead of an emulation layer which is almost adequate for most tasks, but needs careful testing with anything you're planning on using in production because any action you try performing may or may not work as designed, we'll have a full blown OS which is almost adequate for most tasks, but needs careful testing with anything you're planning on using in production because any action you try performing may or may not work as designed.
Great. Thanks.
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Preventing Bitrot (Score:2, Interesting)
With Microsoft changing the driver model and the API of Windows with Vista, a lot of applications and devices will not be supported by the latest and greatest from Redmond. This means no security patches/bugfixes for old equipment and software.
If ReactOS can emulate Win2k/XP, it could be used as a secure and supported replacement in those environments.
Non-Vista-compatible version? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having begun the struggle with adapting application installers to Vista, I think I'd be more interested in a version of ReactOS that ISN'T Vista compatible.
You can imagine what the folks in Redmond are .... (Score:4, Funny)
"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.
ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Speed - Wine, since it is an emulator, can never be as fast as ReactOS, a dedicated OS. This is usually advanced without any sort of benchmarks or other proof to back it up. First, Wine Is Not an Emulator, it is just an implementation of the win32 api. There is no technical reason why Wine couldn't be as fast as other "native" Linux APIs, such as QT or Gtk+. Furthermore, there have long been reports of Windows programs running faster on Wine than native Windows.
Driver Compatibility - ReactOS can use native Windows drivers. Projects like NdisWrapper [sourceforge.net] have shown that it is possible to use Windows drivers on Linux too, if enough people are interested. Of course, Linux already has drivers available for a great deal of hardware. 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.
User Interface Familiarity - Windows users would feel right at home, with virtually no learning curve. This ignores the fact that anyone who has been through Win 3.1 -> Win 9x -> Win XP -> Vista will know that Window's interface is anything but consistent, things move around and change quite a bit between major releases. 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.
Don't get me wrong, I think ReactOS is a pretty cool project, and it would be kind of neat to have an open source Windows clone, however as I said I can't really find much practical reason for it beyond the coolness factor. It seems like one would be better off just integrating Wine into Linux better. Please feel free to enlighten me. ;)
Re:ironic (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Do you have any proof that this is the case, i.e. is there currently an example of ReactOS running an application that Wine cann
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Repeat after me.
WINE stands for Wine Is NOT an Emulator.
WINE stands for Wine Is NOT an Emulator.
WINE stands for Wine Is NOT an Emulator.
Did I mention that it is not an emulator
That said, I agree with the rest of the post. I tried the VMWare version a few minutes ago. It booted in about 10 seconds on my old computer (Athlon 2000+). I reduced the VM memory to 64 MB and it booted as qui
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http://www.winehq.com/site/myths [winehq.com]
Perhaps you can point to where they did say it was an emulator.
But you right about the Irony. I ranted needlessly when I saw the Wine myths and did not read carefully enough when the parent was in fact debunking those very myths. For that I apologize.
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Motivation
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It always amuses me when the uneducated try to pick up phrases they have overheard lawyers, scientists, or other educated people use, hoping to lend a false sense of respectability to their claims.
Its ironic, because people who actually went to college immediately recognize that the person misusing academic or legal terminology is trying so hard to make a point that it probably can't stand on its own.
Well, either that, or the speaker is an idiot.
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FUD - ReactOs is legal (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:FUD - ReactOs is legal (Score:4, Insightful)
Except via patent claims, for which independent development is not an adequate defense.
software patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, in Europe we still don't have (enforcable) softwarepatents. Though it being an Open Source project, I'm not sure under what jurisdiction it falls.
But you make a good point: more proof that softwarepatents suck.
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If they start copying the visual aspects too closely, they are in danger of infringing on MS's copyrights on the look and feel. If not truely infringing, they may get close enough to get tied up in lawsuits for
Then again, it doesn't look like they're big enough to be on MS's radar.
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You mean like how Apple prevailed in its L&F lawsuits against Microsoft that dragged on for years? Oh wait, Apple didn't prevail, and eventually the two companies called a truce (with some money changing hands in the process). I seem to recall the EFF and/or FSF advocating boycotts
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Good luck hosting the project in timbuktu.
memory footprint (Score:4, Insightful)
I want to know how much memory ReactOS takes up versus WindowsXP. Has someone run it who can trivially answer? Did these guys make a smaller, lighter windows?
Re:memory footprint (Score:4, Informative)
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Almost certainly. But given that major features are missing, that's hardly surprising.
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slides unavailable (Score:3, Informative)
Still too much in the kernel (Score:3, Interesting)
ReactOS still, apparently, has much of the graphics system in the kernel. Along with drivers. It emulates NT 4/2000/XP architecture, not NT 3.51, which actually had a cleaner kernel.
But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.
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So when they move to mimic Vista's kernel, this will all be moot then...
But at least they didn't put in a 16-bit subsystem.
Um, you act like an independent OS subsystem is a bad thing. The client/server kernel of NT is WHAT MAKES IT INTERESTING, and also is part of why the NT kernel gets the respect it does in spite of the Win32
mimicking bill gates w/ win98 (Score:4, Informative)
hey, that sounds mighty familiar... [google.com]
Identical? (Score:4, Interesting)
Old Hacker Rule (Score:3, Insightful)
With alpha or beta software, before giving a demo, test what you are going to do in private.
If it doesn't work, don't do it.
Too bad. The world would be a better place with ReactOS. What we need is a fat ass investor with loads of cash and a grudge against Microsoft to donate to this thing.
Linux has proven you can have a viable freeware OS. Now, while Vista makes everyones life miserable, there is an opening.
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> and a grudge against Microsoft to donate to this thing.
Nobody with that sort of cash is likely to be stupid enough to piss it away without a little thought. Just what problem is ReactOS trying to solve?
Is it running Windows executables on a Free platform? Then just toss the money upstream to the Wine developers, they are making most of the progress anyway. Wine is already running major 3D games
Windows clone? Why not go for OS X? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why clone a bad interface when you can clone a good one that many people would like to use?
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mitigating lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Facts badly wrong in parent, mod down (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Red flag? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Red flag? (Score:5, Funny)
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put aside the fact that the softwares you mentionned are emulators, not OS,
it would steal users from windows.
imagine, having an OS the same as windows, friendly for computer illiterate
need i explain more ?
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As the Bard might say: (Score:2)
Re:WTF??? (Score:4, Insightful)
That doesn't necessarily follow. Duplicating a broken API will retain some of the security problems designed into the original OS.
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Re:WTF??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Microsoft and Apple have held the marketplace hostage for so long, that they can get away with ignoring the demands of their users, which is the symptom of a market out of whack. I want to run OSX on a box I build, but I can't. I want to run Vista without DRM, but I can't. I can keep going like this for a long time. It's the lack of serious competition that has kept the entire desktop market moribund for decades now.
We need another player, simple as that. We need a well-financed company to get into the desktop operating system game and stay there for a solid decade. Then we'll start seeing products and features that we REALLY want, at reasonable prices. Until then, it's going to be this silly charade of Bill and Steve, who we're supposed to believe are competitors, when they're really just enabling each other to abuse their customers, playing to their business partners in the entertainment-industrial complex. They may have done something at one time to move the status quo forward, but in the last decade they've just been a couple of jackoffs, doing zip for you and me.
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Or, how about this: It's not done yet. Keep your peanuts to yourself.
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Here is some information about naming conventions all over the world (anchored to Romania):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name#Romania [wikipedia.org]