The state of ReactOS svn (Part 1)

It has been years since I last tried ReactOS. For those who aren’t familiar with ReactOS, it is an open source project aimed at writing and operating system from scratch that is compatible with Microsoft Windows drivers and software. I went ahead and downloaded a svn build from here . I extracted the tarball using p7zip and placed the boot installer iso on my desktop. I already had qemu installed so I opened a terminal and ran:

qemu-img create  hd.img 5G

qemu -m 384 -boot d -hdd hd.img -cdrom bootcd-31182-rel.iso

This created a 5GB disk image and launched the React OS installer.

I was presented with the following installer screen

I clicked Next then I clicked ‘C’ to create a new partition to install ReactOS on.

The next step was to format the new parittion using Fat filesystem. ReactOS doesn’t have NTFS support. I hope this get’s implemented somewhere down the line before ReactOS 1.0 is released.

Next is the installation path. Leaving it the default should be well.

ReactOS then copied the files which was pretty straight forward.

 

ReactOS installer then installed a bootloader to the disk MBR

And that’s it. The installer now rebooted to the newly installed system

    

On the first boot, I was presented with a wizard to configure the system.

     

After creating a default user, I added a hostname for the computer, set system time and created a administrator password.

   

I rebooted again to the new desktop. The default ReactOS desktop resembles very much the windows 2000 desktop.

Command line work in ReactOS similarly to Windows XP. It would be nice however if they could bundle a scripting language similar to bash. Bash should work via cygwin though.

ReactOS includes a file manager ‘ReactOS Explorer’ which uses some nice Tango icons. Using Tango icons is a smart move because the Tango project aims at providing a common feel between different desktop environments though similarly designed icon themes.

    

When it comes to bundled software, ReactOS includes two games, a minesweeper clone and a cards game. This isn’t much but it is does serve as a proof that certain applications do work. It is also visible that ReactOS makes heavy use of wine which shows the power of open source.

Since ReactOS is still in early development stages, some features are not yet implemented including certain networking applications.

As a clone of Windows, ReactOS borrows a lot of its design. This includes the different system properties panels. ReactOS also includes a device manager similar to Windows 2000 and XP. It was however hard to judge the device manager since I tested under qemu where hardware is labeled differently and acts differently. The device manager only lists hardware at the moment and doesn’t allow uninstalling or installing drivers.

 

The usual desktop utilities such are the ‘Run’ command are already implemented. A nice character map application is also installed by default.

    

Frontends for typical system adminstration tools that a user might expect to find in a modern user friendly operating system are found in the start menu but there are currently no backends for them so they aren’t very helpful. However, this does mean that we can expect to have them working in later development releases.

ReactOS additionally includes a startup service manager similar to the one found in Windows 2000 and XP. It also includes a power management applet. Hopefully as the ReactOS kernel improves, it will support modern ACPI functions similar to Windows XP and Linux 2.6

     

The main question here is “Why ReactOS?”. Isn’t it better to advise people to switch to Linux instead of a Microsoft Windows clone? Linux is already more manageable, more secure and definitely much more stable than windows. The answer is that over the last 12 years, a lot of work and energy has been placed into writing applications tailored for the Windows platform. Although Linux is getting rich with graphics applications such as Gimp, Inkscape and Blender and there are lots of games that run natively on Linux, it still lacks engineering applications such as H2Omap, AutoCAD and Sap2000. Such applications are unlikely to be ported to Linux. This makes the need for a Windows or a Windows compatible platform a definite need. Another point is that once ReactOS matures enough to reach a usable state, it is likely to become more secure than Microsoft’s Windows due to it’s open source nature.

In the next part of this review, I will try a new svn snapshot and I see how applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice.org run.