ReactOS 0.1.0 Released

JasonFilby writes "ReactOS 0.1.0 has been released! ReactOS is an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. In this release, among other new features and fixes, especially worth mentioning are the ability to boot from CD and self-hosting capabilities (ReactOS can be compiled on ReactOS)." ReactOS has been in progress for a while, often tied to other projects with the aim of seamlessly replacing Windows: you can download an image of Bochs 2.0 with ReactOS 0.1.0 preloaded from the download and changelog page.

But Windows NT is not 2k...

[Jace of Fuse!]

From the site, the focus seems to be on 4.0, not 2K/XP. While this will be great for those who have a huge amount of time and effort invested in implimenting an NT4.0 environment, it doesn't make much sense for someone who has migrated to 2K/XP to move back to ReactOS.

I do think this is really cool though, and I plan to keep my eye on this. With any luck it'll come far enough to start implimenting 2k/Xp compatibility.

Re:We have an embarrassment of riches here

[Dave2 Wickham]

from the and-for-your-39th-os dept.

;-)

This could be useful for people who don't want to fork out for NT/have to use MS products...

And finally, <stupid_comment>Oh look! An MS ad!</stupid_comment>

legal trouble ahead?

[MobyTurbo]

I wonder if ReactOS, if they become successful, might end up in a bit of legal trouble from Microsoft. I'm sure MS has patents and copyrights up the wazoo on Windows NT, and is not afraid to take advantage of them. Remember how they arrogantly sued the company they bought MS-DOS from out of existence because they were worried they would add multitasking to it? Even though that company had some contractual rights to the IP MS purchased from them, which ReactOS hasn't.

Could it be merged with wine??

[t0qer]

While this is cool a bunch of guys with time on their hands figured out how to get binary compatility with NT, the one thing that holds people to NT now(XP/2k) is the direct X layer between hardware and OS.

It's still a pretty good feat though and is noteworthy of frontpage news. If the authors are reading would you mind answering a few questions?
1. What timeline do the authors see for adding a directX layer?
2. Do you forsee using the wineX code for reference or will you rewrite it from scratch?

Embedded systems?

[Autonymous Toaster]

Is this actually intended to supplant Windows on the desktop, or is it more aimed at small embedded systems? Or alternately, is there a parallel project that aims to replace Windows CE for the latter? I know there are a lot of similarities between NT4 and CE.

I am not personally a fan or a "user" (hah!) of Windows, but I have...friends...who might be interested in a "sidegrade" to an open-source embedded OS which is WinCE compatible. If nothing else we might be able to improve the security and reliability of embedded applications that have already been developed for Microsoft OSes. There is nothing worse than a small, single-purpose appliance - say for making toast - that can't perform reliably because the underlying OS is faulty, or constantly requires patches to assure peace of mind (hah!).

Re:But Windows NT is not 2k...

[TheRaven64]

I recently dug out my old P133, and booted to NT4.0 to remove the contents of the hard disk before installing a real OS (FreeBSD). I was amazed. NT4.0 is actually fast on that kind of hardware (subjectively as fast as Win2K or Linux/Gnome on a 1GHz Athlon). If ReactOS can produce this level of performance along with application compatibility with later versions of windows it will definitely have a place.

The OS world from the 'GO' perspective

[Billy the Mountain]

This announcement of this OS may seem interesting, but if you play the endlessly fascinating game of Go, your insight can become more balanced. For example, When Microsoft was well on the way of total OS dominance, it was as if the board had many stones, but all in one corner. Then Linus Torvalds, almost absentmindedly, played a stone in the opposite corner that was mostly vacant and Microsoft and the rest of the world ignored it, so Linus played a few more stones. Soon there was a formidable structure that Microsoft and the rest of the world couldn't ignore. And that's where we are today. Now ReactOS comes along and plays a stone, but no matter where the stone is placed on the OS board, the position is weak.

BTM

Re:Embedded systems?

[JasonFilby]

Although we aren't expressly targeting embedded, it is an option. However, I'd say ReactOS would make the biggest impact on the desktop.

Cheers
Jason

Re: How can this possibly be useful?

[Antity]

Despite the quality and feature rich nature of many open-source projects, there are still loads of important projects waiting to be written. This project seems like a waste of good programmers to me.

I know quite some people with this attitude, and I'm afraid that most of them Just Don't Get It.

Most of the people writing Open Source software are doing it because they like to do it. That's all.

If somebody is doing something special just for the fun of it, you can't just kick him and say: "That's of no use for anybody, why don't you just do $THIS instead?"

Won't work at all if he's not interested in doing $THIS. Things just don't work this way. And this is a Good Thing[tm].

And, coming back to your question, no, the world wouldn't be a better place. :-) Definitely no.

[Footnote and rant: Maybe I should send good ol' George W. a mail asking him to do something different because that would make much more sense for everybody else than what he's doing at the moment. But I'm afraid this won't work either. He just likes what he's doing ATM too much, I'd guess.]

Re:no gui

[CaptainBaz]

If they were 'free', where would the IIS license come from?

Senseless.

[FreeLinux]

First off, this is "supposed" to be a drop in replacement for Windows NT 4.0. Why? Even Microsoft is trying to abandon NT 4.0.

But, Ok you want a drop in replacement for NT 4.0. So, where is the GUI? There is no GUI. Second, but perhaps most importantly, where is the file system support. This thing uses FAT32. Windows NT 4.0 can use FAT32 but, its primary file system is NTFS.

How can they possibly call it a seamless replacement for NT 4.0 with no GUI and no NTFS file system. I'm sorry but, renaming FreeDos utilities to try to emulate the CMD.EXE shell is hardly a substitute for NT 4.0 and I won't even mention Windows 2000.

Re:no gui

[mentin]

A "free" machine that could run IIS would be a killer in some Windows shops.

I have not seen a free download of IIS recently. The last one I saw was in Option Pack for NT 4.0, but that was IIS 4.0 and you probably don't want to run it (given the number of security bugs fixed in more recent versions). The performance of latest versions is also considerably better.

So you would have to wait several years more, till those guys reimplement IIS too. Do you think it is time well spent?

Finally! A useful OSS project!

[NineNine]

Well, I'm exaggerating a bit. VNC is useful. This is one I'm definitely trying. There's no way in hell I'm gutting my servers to move to a *nix, but if I can get a free copy of NT for servers, I'm all for it. I can see this, if it works as advertised, as becoming a *major* player in the server market, potentially dwarfing any Linux distros.

Re:Senseless.

[Gatton]

For one thing you have to start somewhere. If you'd read the article you'd know that it isn't planned to be compatible with NT 4.0 only. They're thinking ahead and planning for all future iterations of NT (ie Win2k, XP etc.)

Secondly, and I realize this has been mentioned by others already but I'll say it again, WHY are you berating a product at 0.1.0 for lacking features??? Your nick is FreeLinux, I wonder were you around for one of those .9x releases of Linux berating Linus for not having SMP or IDE support?

I'm not a an OS or kernel hacker or any other type of programmer. But it seems to me this is exactly the type of project that many /. readers are interested in and if this intrigues even one talented OS programmer/enthusiast to contribute to the project then that's a good thing for ReactOS.

Re:Is this a worthwhile project?

[KJKHyperion]

The reason we don't run any Windows NT based systems in production is that the architecture is flawed. It's a desktop OS with "enterprise" features tacked on. The fundamental architecture of NT is why it sucks, in my mind.

Please, don't talk about things you don't know about. What you are commenting on is a questionable implementation, not a bad design. In fact, Windows is quite the opposite: an excellent system clogged up with poor, useless, superfluous or otherwise bad software

I have a lot of respect for these guys, kernel hacking from the ground up is tough stuff, but I'd rather see them contributing their talent to the Linux or BSD projects rather than copying a flawed architecture.

Personally, I've found Linux to suck. Really suck. I'll probably have to use it in the next years, as the last way to use a computer without selling my brain to IBM, Sun, Microsoft or Apple, but I'll never really like it. I'm a Windows guy. I've never used anything else (except trying Linux because of its supposed "coolness"), and I contribute (well... I try) to ReactOS because that's where my heart is

The "but Linux is clearly superior!" attitude doesn't cut it - you have to explain why, and without any internals programming experience (as Microsoft's user interface doesn't make any justice to the underlying system) you simply lack the knowledge to do it

Re:Is this a worthwhile project?

[KJKHyperion]

That sold linux to quite a few skeptics in our IT department, as it should.

See, it's just a matter of perspective. You keep talking about ReactOS like it's a product you can go and buy at WalMart's. It's not. It's far from being a product. From this perspective, probably even DOS would be better than ReactOS

What's so special about ReactOS is that it's one of the few open source project of cloning the NT kernel still alive, if not the only. What does this mean?

• Windows will not die. If Microsoft discontinues it, the knowledge and source code of ReactOS will remain. This may not sound much, but for some it's important
• Variety. ReactOS is the only non-Unix and non-completely-experimental open source system I know of. ReactOS sets a precedent (if you think this could kill ReactOS, think again. Implementing Unix on top of the NT kernel isn't that hard, and I'm about to demonstrate it)
• Driver support. If you ever found yourself complaining about some hardware manufacturer only writing drivers for Windows, you'll understand how important this is

Finally, ReactOS is not a product, nor part of a product line. We aren't afraid to document how to replace or customize system components, fearing that someone will do better than us, and kill the sales of the next release

Folks who have your level of internals experience aren't working in corporate IT departments, they're at MS or IBM and/or contributing to projects like ReactOS. I'm your typical IT guy, and my example is a typical IT project. And in this project, linux put NT to shame :)

Like I said before, it's too early to talk about ReactOS in these terms - it barely runs GNU Make and the GCC toolchain, it has no networking, no exceptional scheduling algorithm, no security (if you have installed ReactOS, try "kill 1" - 1 is the kernel's PID, guess what happens), nothing of interest to anyone but us into the project. I can only guarantee that ReactOS Advanced Server (if ever) will not include Paint, nor Minesweeper, nor the latest DirectX :-) (unless Jason has other plans :-P)

Re:no gui

[nutznboltz]

I boot it up under bochs and run winhello.exe which shows that "pretty" window. Trouble is I can't manipulate the window in any way and that includes terminate it. I'd RTFM if there was anything to read. I'll RTSL someday soon.