[buug] Intriguing New OS on the Horizon

Pewter Bot pewterbot9 at gmail.com
Mon May 11 02:37:28 PDT 2009


It's called "ReactOS", now in alpha stage...learned about it watching
one of Chris Pirillo's videos:

How do You Run Windows Programs without Windows
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9pICtFavMs

So I went to their site [ http://www.reactos.org/ ] to learn more. It
consists of "only of GNU GPL (General Public License) and GPL
compatible licensed source code."

--Here's their spiel as it appears on the home page;

ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of
Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow
the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware
level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux
based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system
which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows
applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system.
Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is
used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of
Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal
of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS
without the end user noticing the change.

--end of spiel

--And an excerpt from their FAQ page:

ReactOS works very closely with Wine, and thus both projects actually
benefit from each other. We have several developers in both the WINE
and ReactOS projects that work on cross-compatibility issues between
the two projects.

It is our view that Linux + Wine can never be a full replacement for
Microsoft(R) Windows(R). ReactOS has the potential for a much higher
degree of compatibility - especially for Microsoft(R) Windows(R)
drivers - which WINE does not address.

--end of excerpt

How intriguing. Thought others here might be curious about these GPL
upstarts! Is this the first GNU derived OS that is not a
unix-compatible system?

-- 
Zeke Krahlin
City of the Undead




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