The State of ReactOS's Crazy Open Source Windows Replacement 208
jeditobe writes with a link to a talk (video recorded, with transcript) about a project we've been posting about for years: ambitious Windows-replacement ReactOS: "In this talk, Alex Ionescu, lead kernel developer for the ReactOS project since 2004 (and recently returning after a long hiatus) will talk about the project's current state, having just passed revision 60000 in the SVN repository. Alex will also cover some of the project's goals, the development and testing methodology being such a massive undertaking (an open source project to reimplement all of Windows from scratch!), partnership with other open source projects (MinGW, Wine, Haiku, etc...). Alex will talk both about the infrastructure side about running such a massive OS project (but without Linux's corporate resources), as well as the day-to-day development challenges of a highly distributed team and the lack of Win32 internals knowledge that makes it hard to recruit. Finally, Alex will do a few demos of the OS, try out a few games and applications, Internet access, etc, and of course, show off a few blue screens of death."
ReactOS takes an initiative (Score:3, Informative)
Aleksey Bragin, the project coordinator writes [reactos.org]:
"Monstera is a new implementation of a memory manager (along with a cache manager) compatible with the ReactOS kernel at source code level and providing the same binary compatible Native API through a lightweight wrapper. Monstera is implemented in a subset of C++ programming language.
Key ideas:
1. Object oriented language for object oriented kernel. When NT was implemented, C++ wasn't that good.
4. Don't drift away too much. It's still based on NT architecture, but think of it as if Microsoft Research would decide to reimplement NT in C++ for fun."
Re:Wine and ReactOS are casualties (Score:5, Informative)
Apart from when there is direct evidence of malice on Microsoft's front.. of which there has been plenty. They've even been convicted for anti-competitive behaviour.
David Cole and Phil Barrett exchanged emails on 30 September 1991: " "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1
( a href=http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/>source article )
The article continues in that vein for quite a while..
Re:Just ignore it. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: BSOD as a replacement feature? (Score:3, Informative)
The BSOD came into being as a feature of Windows NT and has NEVER existed in the DOS derived versions of Windows (3.1, 95, 98, ME)
Oh, so very wrong. [wikipedia.org]
Re:BSOD as a replacement feature? (Score:4, Informative)
> I have never seen a Linux Install work out of the box. NEVER. And by work I mean you actually have something that you don't have to install drivers, compile code or update things before you can use it. You want a GUI? That's 4 hours of compiling things, and then you have to futz with closed source drivers that only work on one specific kernel version or hope the open source drivers even implement half the functionality of the windows version. That is NOT working out of the box.
Try using a distro newer than 2001 releases.