http://www.osnews.com/story/14932/ReactOS_0_3_0-rc1_Released Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:15:45 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?134925 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134925 Comparing Windows (TM) and ReactOS or Wine shows clearly that free and open source software can't compete with proprietary software in any way. There are a lot of features on Microsoft (TM) Windows (TM) that are not supported by either ReactOS or Wine, and it is doubtful we'll ever see them implemented:

- Digital Rights Management

Because of this shortcoming, there's no way to restrict usage of the contents on your hard disk.

- Product Activation

You can't e.g. use your Microsoft (TM) Windows (TM) activation key to activate your copies of ReactOS and Wine as well, since neither of them provides a Product Activation feature.

- WinFS

Store your data as a searchable database. Although it is not yet supported by Microsoft (TM) Windows (TM) as well, it will be implemented in Windows (TM) before either ReactOS or Wine.

I don't get why people still believe in free and open source software.

Def

Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp.
Def and Detlef Niehof are not registered trademarks of Detlef Niehof. Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Detlef Niehof) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134937 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134937 According to developers, 0.3.0 RC2 will be the release if no new bugs are found. The changelog will be released then. Also, 0.4 is being developed concurrently with 0.3, so it should be out relatively soon after 0.3. Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (brewin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134945 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134945 I'll have to toss together a test machine... I wonder if it can run Apache... Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous Coward) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134956 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134956 Why dopnt you go look on the website or ask on irc? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (zizban) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134970 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134970 I couldn't get this to work under Parallels -- granted, I didn't try too hard. Someone tell me why the LiveCD version still looks for a valid partition table/partition on the main hard disk? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 02:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Tom K) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134976 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134976 I am really glad that they are close to being done with their audit. It was truly disheartening when I heard about the alleged plagiarism of Microsoft code. I wish I had a spare machine accessible right now so I could give this a shot. I guess I will wait for the final release of 0.4 as it would give me a decent enough timeframe to put together a play machine and try out this wonderful alternative OS! Thanks for all the hard work ReactOS devs! Mon, 19 Jun 2006 02:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (suryad) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134981 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134981 @ OSDir: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=677&sli... Mon, 19 Jun 2006 03:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (chrishaney) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134987 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134987 WOW! 90% Great job ReactOS team! I'm very surprised its that far along so quickly for something so complicated Mon, 19 Jun 2006 03:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ValiantSoul) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?134996 http://www.osnews.com/thread?134996 Hmm, from the wiki:

The homepage is updated daily with the current progress. It will take a relatively short time to reach 60%, however once 90% has been reached, expect the progress to slow down considerably. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 04:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135001 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135001 C'mon Guys, don't vote him down, ...
If he complies, that DRM, Product Activation and WinFS are the reasons not to use FOSS, then this is to be meant ironical, isn't it ?
:-)

@Article:

I personaly think that ReactOS even if it is a nice example of what can be done, is some how a waste of time and skill. In my opinion creating another free Operating System isn't the right way, this guys seem to be really good in what they are doing, so I would like to them helping the WINE team or creating a driver compatiblity layer to run _any_ Windows driver on Linux ....

Just my 2 € cents... Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (inetman) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135002 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135002 It can't run Apache yet, but it can run the TinyWeb server as done by someone in this thread on the forums http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2062 which is promising. But as ReactOS is getting better everyday it should be able to run Apache soon. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (whitehornmatt) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135006 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135006 They do in fact help the wine team, and vice versa. There's a lot of cross pollination between the two projects to my knowledge.Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Danger hiptop 2.0; U; AvantGo 3.2) Mon, 19 Jun 2006 06:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (anevilyak) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135007 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135007 I strongly agree. Please, vote him up, he did not deserve a -3. In fact, it was hilarious, too bad some people don't have a sense of humor.

About the WINE part, I understood that there is a lot of collaboration. A Windows Win32 compatible OS with a lot of GNU / FOSS software could be perfect to get people away from the enslavement of Evil;-) Mon, 19 Jun 2006 06:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135012 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135012 I have to ask, why do I keep seeing posts with browser ID strings at the end? Is that a side effect of the mobile site, or are people just trying to come off at 1337 d00dz? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 06:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Celerate) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135015 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135015 Wow. It tooks some months, but this far, no copyrighted code found.

Looks like another SCO-like FUD ? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 06:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (fredb1974) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135022 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135022 Please, vote him up, he did not deserve a -3. In fact, it was hilarious, too bad some people don't have a sense of humor.

Thanks for that. Sure it was a joke, although maybe not a particularly good one. I really do hope that ReactOS will take off, of course, but I guess that was very obvious from my first post.

Def Mon, 19 Jun 2006 07:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Detlef Niehof) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135023 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135023 I didn't think it was that great, but it was good for a chuckle. I think certain people only read the first couple of lines and didn't realize he was joking before they modded him down Mon, 19 Jun 2006 07:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135024 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135024 How good is ReactOS for running windows appliations at this point ?
Do MS Office works ?
What about a few other random applications, say
LispWorks - www.lispworks.com, Skype, or Filemaker ? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 07:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ratatask) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135027 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135027 Screenshots of many apps:
http://www.reactos.org/?page=screenshots

Compatibility Database:
http://www.reactos.org/support/

MS Office 95 and OpenOffice 1.x work.
I don't know about LispWorks, Skype, or Filemaker although I know for sure that Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Adobe Photoshop 3-5, Paint Shop Pro 4, MS Visual Basic 6, DOSBox, IrfanView and a lot of more work. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (frik85) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135028 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135028 I voted it up at -5.

I was thinking that I'd try to explain it was sarcasm, and should not be modded down. I decided not to, but glad some others took the initiative. I guess some people just glance at things and don't really read.

Back on topic, I'm glad for reactos. I just downloaded the live cd the other day,and now they release a new one. Good thing it's so small.

The wiki seams a little sparse. I wonder how far drivers/driver compatibility have come.

I remember first hearing about this 2 years ago when captive NTFS came out, I thought it was a bad idea, but I'm all for it now. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mikesum32) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135030 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135030 What about xen support? Does it work? anyone tried it? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Karma_Police) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135034 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135034 http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Xen_port Mon, 19 Jun 2006 08:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (frik85) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135039 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135039 it's a bit unfair to say these things, isn't it?

first, Reactos is very new, and developed by just a few people. compare this to MS Windows, being worked on since what, 1990? and by how many fulltime engineers?

second, reactos is just copying windows. and as windows doesn't give much info about itself, they have to spend a lot of time figuring out how windows does stuff.

Compare this to linux, in serious development since before 2000 by several thousands of developers.

Compare apples to apples, and I think you can say the Linux Kernel is much more advanced than the current Windows Kernel.

As a DE and development environment, KDE is generally equal or ahead of Windows.

And well, Windows lacks most of the userland apps most linux distributions offer in the form of the GNU tools, so I guess that's another free software win.

OK, MS has some things better. MS Office, for example, kicks the free software offerings' asses. OO.o is too slow, and due to bad design very hard to develop for. Koffice would be easier to extend and turn into serious competition for MS Office, but apparently it's not sexy enough, big company's prefer throwing money in the black hole OO.o is.

Another plus for MS is the huge amount of apps available, tough that's not their accomplishment. And many of these apps have free and almost-as-good equivalents (apps like Kalzium, free on linux, are very expensive on windows...).

And of course, MS keeps its specifications closed and mangles many open protocols, so it is hard for non-microsoft users to interact with MS' products. Actually I would say that's a big no-no, but many people seem to see it as an advantage ("MS word can open MS word documents, OO.o cannot" - while OO does a nice job, and MS word is unable to open ODF files - while THAT is a official ISO standard file format!). Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (superstoned) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135040 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135040 i missed the sarcasm part ;-) Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (superstoned) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135041 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135041 clearly, i didn't see his sarcasm at first ;-) Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (superstoned) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135044 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135044 One of the ReactOS developers attempted a port to Xen 3.0 whilst it was still in heavy development (and changing rapidly) but I think he gave up because of API churn in Xen, and because he had other things to do in ReactOS-land.

Hopefully the port will be revived at some point, the code would be at least partially portable to the latest Xen.

Also, I think it'd be worth investigating using ReactOS virtual machines to run Windows drivers and export those devices back to Linux. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Mark Williamson) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135050 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135050 > Looks like another SCO-like FUD ?

No, it was an anti-FUD measure. Nobody said that copyrighted code was copied. Instead, by the audit the team made sure that nobody who ever looked at copyrighted code writes portions of the according ReactOS code. This is called clean-room reverse engineering and is done because that way it's easier to prove that no copyrighted code made it into the project, just in case someone tried to sue them for it. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Morin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135051 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135051 I think they should do something with GUI bugs. Is it really so hard to implement GDI and create good controls? One is too much space between items on menubar. Fonts are at wrong positions. There are problems with sizes of components. It all looks very bad (for me). I think, those are bugs which already appeared in Wine.

Does ReactOS use Windows drivers? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mormon) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135054 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135054 Aren't you supposed to run IIS on it ;-) ? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (el3ktro) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135057 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135057 Side effect of the software OSNews runs, which puts the browser string in when its a mobile or (I think?) text-mode browser used to comment. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (MYOB) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135067 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135067 if you take a close look at their download page, you will notice that you do not need a spare machine to run it. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 12:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (ciphernaut) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135068 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135068 Several GUI glitches will get fixed before 0.3.0 release (wine code regression, etc.).

"ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface."

ReactOS come with several open source standard driver. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 12:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (frik85) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135074 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135074 I hope this time we'll get a device manager and some driver compatibilities... so we could use current Windows driver with it. I'd like to see some skinning possibilities too (ie www.crystalxp.net) and it could give some serious trouble over to MS. Imagine if it ever get to work with Active Directory, now they would kick MS bµtt... Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (werfu) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135076 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135076 http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Supported_Hardware

The Plug&Play support has been improved and there is a simple device manager and service manager in ReactOS 0.3 RC1. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 13:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (frik85) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135088 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135088 Nor did I. It was superbly masked Mon, 19 Jun 2006 14:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dylansmrjones) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135089 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135089 And because it's a necessity according to US law. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dylansmrjones) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135094 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135094 /+1 good one. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (gilboa) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135096 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135096 Microsoft Windows 1.0: Released 1985
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryDesktop.mspx
Linux began development in 1991
http://www.linux10.org/history/
KDE was founded in 1996
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Using_KDE_:_History_of_KDE Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (lopisaur) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135098 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135098 You need it or it kills any new OS.

There are alot of new os' that have cool features but are worthless because they don't have drivers.


We need a NEW way to write drivers like Scitech does.
Like some program that actually compiles specs into code!!!!!

We need alternative to X.org windows.

DirectFB ? Seems like they don't have enough drivers. Writing drivers is a bitch. We need alternatives. Scitech gets this. Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Eric Martin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135111 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135111 One of the best posts I have seen in a while LMAO! Sublime! Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (suryad) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135112 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135112 Yes I did...and you are right...the unfortunate but natural side effect of reading the headline, going YIPPEE!! and posting really quick without going ahead and checking out more information on their website. Thanks for the heads up! Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (suryad) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135116 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135116 Indeed, an impressive bit of trolling.Edited 2006-06-19 17:40 Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (vitae) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135153 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135153 > We need a NEW way to write drivers like Scitech does.
> Like some program that actually compiles specs into code!!!!!

The problem is how to write down specs in a formal, yet OS-agnostic way. I'm not saying it's impossible (I have considered experimenting a bit in that direction but didn't due to lack of time), but it's hard. Guess I'll give it a try when the summer exams are over Mon, 19 Jun 2006 19:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Morin) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135177 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135177 How "compatible" is ReactOS with viruses, worms and trojan horses? Mon, 19 Jun 2006 19:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bufalo_1973) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135216 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135216 sure, windows 1.0 in 1985. but microsoft already had a bit more than 1 person working on it, isn't it? Same with KDE - Linux and KDE started way more slowly, and still have to work with much less manhours compared to Windows. well, maybe that's not true for Linux vs the Windows kernel... Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (superstoned) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135227 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135227 Actually, Wine is no longer accepting code from ReactOS due specifically to fears of legal issues from reverse engineering. They seem to believe that the only truly safe way RE method is black-box, and even clean-rom RE is out. :/

Anyway, I believe code is still flowing the other way, and good luck to ReactOS! Mon, 19 Jun 2006 23:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mmebane) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135247 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135247 Sweet I got BSOD from a non microsoft product! I was playing around with it in a vm and it looks pretty cool. Good job Reactos. Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (msg43) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135292 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135292 Indeed ;-) Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (superstoned) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135361 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135361 Re: "a waste of time" statement the following questions:

1. Why would I buy a proprietary O.S. that I have to be 1 copy for each machine when I could get an open source version I could copy to *any* computer in my household?
2. Why would I want MS to dictate to me how I use my legal freedom with MP3, etc. I don't have Sony breathing down my back everytime I record a TV show on my VCR?
3. Why would I want WinFS when there is/will be better implementations of a FS than WinFS-ReactOS, being an Open source project can/will be able to take advantage of such a filesystem?

Making a (possibibly) better functioning/more versatile version of Windows than windows? Doesn't sound like a wast of time to me

Just my $.02 ;-)Edited 2006-06-20 14:37 Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (elektrik) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?135362 http://www.osnews.com/thread?135362 Well, could you run IIS on .3 of windows? =] Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (elektrik) Comments