A few weeks ago somebody mentioned ReactOS as an alternative to MS
Windows, and I think I said that I'd take a look and report back when I
had some spare machines in my workroom.
I downloaded 0.3.12 which is their last "official" release, it's marked
"Alpha" but quite frankly doesn't deserve to be. The installation
program worked, except that to use the commodity Compaqs that I've got
here I had to tell it to use VGA resolution/colours- otherwise I'd get a
BSOD. It couldn't see the LAN using either the inbuilt NIC or a
Compaq/Intel PCI card, however during early installation it tried to
download a missing component (Gecko) from an unspecified location which
resulted in a lockup. Leaving aside the lousy display, there were
repeated examples of poor UI implementation, e.g. radio buttons with no
item selected, or a login box for an unspecified user which still left
the windows behind it accessible.
A minimal test of FPC (2.4.2) installed from the binary release worked,
in particular the Unicode handling appears to be complete (i.e. I wasn't
seeing the issue I reported for NT4 a few weeks ago 0018803).
Lazarus quite simply didn't run: it displayed the splash and sat there
without console messages or error dialogue then eventually terminated.
I've spent a lot of time using, selling and supporting OSes that were
attempting to play "catch up" with Microsoft, and quite frankly going by
what I've seen I'd not say that ReactOS is in the race. I'd not suggest
that anybody lose any sleep over the fact that Lazarus doesn't run on it.
I was interested to note that the ReactOS developers apparently blame an
OS called Sanos for contributing files or techniques which are too
similar to MS's original for comfort. On investigating, I found that
Sanos is a minimal Win-32 text-mode OS with kernel, networking including
ftpd and so on- and that's just on the first floppy. I thought at that
point that it was worth investigating further since it could provide a
useful upgrade path for anybody still using a DOS extender (GO32 etc.).
Unfortunately it turned out to be rather picky about what hardware it
supported, in particular the model of IDE drive. Having got it installed
I found it stable, but it refused to run FPC or FPC-generated binaries
for reasons that were unclear. If it didn't require MS Visual Studio I
might rebuild it with debugging code enabled, but right now I've got far
more important things on my plate.
So to summarise: not very rewarding, but at least we know.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
--
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