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For those of you that don't know, there's a thing called ReactOS. It's a
free operating system which is supposed to be binary-compatible with
Microsoft Windows XP. (Despite the small and obvious problem that this
_should_ be 100% illegal.)
Well anyway, the CD image is only about 50 MB, so I downloaded it and
had a go at running it.
First of all, I'm using versio 0.3.11, and it's buggy as hell. Windows
randomly vanish into thin air, programs lock up, and at one point I
managed to make the desktop and task bar vanish, leaving me with just
the backdrop image. You *can* do stuff with it, but it's very unreliable.
Aside from that... it looks almost *scarily* like Windows XP. Or maybe
NT4, I'm not sure. Some of it is quite different, some is very similar.
There's quite big chunks of stuff missing of course. (E.g., the event
viewer... doesn't.) I tried to map a network drive and discovered that
the command isn't implemented. That kind of thing.
Then again, I had a go at running a few *real* Windows programs, and
they do in fact run, which is already fantastically unlikely. Obviously
all the programs I tried crashed almost instantly, but almost all of
them did run briefly before dying. That alone ought to be impossible,
but somehow they've managed it.
Of course, the only things I happen to have ISO images for are big,
complex programs with intricate installation routines - exactly the kind
of thing you'd expect to not work. Since I can't get network access to
work right, I can't easily try anything else. Pitty, it would be
interesting to see whether any of the stuff I've written works...
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So this is what it looks like running:
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Preview of image 'reactos 1.png'
![reactos 1.png](/povray.off-topic/attachment/%3C4c20b69d%40news.povray.org%3E/reactos%201.png?preview=1)
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Out of the box, ReactOS comes with all the usual useless junk - MS
Paint, Notepad (!!), several utterly crappy games, and so on. It's even
got WordPad. (WTF?) You also get slightly more useful things like Task
Manager and Explorer.
Tell me, does this or does this not really really look like the real
thing? o_O
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![reactos 6.png](/povray.off-topic/attachment/%3C4c20b748%40news.povray.org%3E/reactos%206.png?preview=1)
Preview of image 'reactos 7.png'
![reactos 7.png](/povray.off-topic/attachment/%3C4c20b748%40news.povray.org%3E/reactos%207.png?preview=1)
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Check out the shutdown message. What's with that?
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On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:11:51 +0200, Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> So this is what it looks like running:
>
Copyright ReactOS Foundation 1996-2009. Yeah right...
-Nekar Xenos-
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On 6/22/2010 8:14 AM, Invisible wrote:
> Tell me, does this or does this not really really look like the real
> thing? o_O
Cute... It pretends to be windows, but isn't...
--
~Mike
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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Cute... It pretends to be windows, but isn't...
Cute or horrifying, depending on your point of view. There are some
things about Windows that you wouldn't *want* to copy!
Even so, many things look very similar yet not quite right. (E.g., that
command prompt has a totally different aspect ratio.)
I haven't managed to get it to successfully run any real Windows
programs yet, but that's probably mostly due to the difficulty of
getting them into the VM without VMware Tools [which, astonishingly,
won't install ;-) ]
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And lo On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:16:53 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> did
spake thusly:
> Check out the shutdown message. What's with that?
They Live!
--
Phil Cook
--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com
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Nekar Xenos wrote:
> Copyright ReactOS Foundation 1996-2009. Yeah right...
Wikipedia claims the first release was in 1998, so I guess it's
*plausible*...
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Invisible wrote:
> Nekar Xenos wrote:
>
>> Copyright ReactOS Foundation 1996-2009. Yeah right...
>
> Wikipedia claims the first release was in 1998, so I guess it's
> *plausible*...
Except for the copyright violations, at least. I strongly suspect there was
no clean-room development going on there.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
that the code does what you think it does, even if
it doesn't do what you wanted.
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