ReactOS
Free Software for OS
Free Software for OS
ReactOS is a computer operating system intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows NT versions 5.x and up (Windows 2000 and its successors). It is claimed to be composed entirely of free software, by means of a complete clean room reverse engineering process, with an extensive on-going audit, being undertaken to protect against claims made by those outside the project.[citation needed]
Although the project is in the alpha development stage as of 2009, many Windows programs already work well. While the ReactOS kernel has been written from scratch, the userland is partially based on the Wine compatibility layer for Unix-like operating systems.
ReactOS is primarily written in the C programming language, with some elements, such as ReactOS Explorer, written in C++. Various components of ReactOS are licensed under the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License and the BSD License.
Hardware Requeriment
The minimum hardware requirements for ReactOS to run are:
- 32MB RAM
- IDE harddisk (not SATA)
- FAT16/FAT32 primary boot partition
- VGA compatible video card (VESA BIOS version v2.0 and higher)
- Standard (PS/2) keyboard
- PS/2 compatible mouse or Microsoft Mouse compatible serial mouse
Furthermore, TCP/IP networking works with one of the following Ethernet cards:
- NE2000 clones (Such as Realtek 8029)
- AMD PCnet32 LANCE
- ADMtek AN983B
- 3COM 3C905B-TX-NM
- Compex ReadyLINK RL2000-PCI
- HP J2585B 10/100VG
- Linksys LNE100TX
- Intel PRO/1000
- D-Link DFE-530TX
Architecture Support
ReactOS developers are currently working on a number of ports of ReactOS:
- x86 (working)
- Xbox (regressed, but will be revived later)
- PowerPC (initial booting)
- ARM (not working, in progress)
- AMD64 (not working, in progress)
As noted, ReactOS can also be run on software which emulates or virtualizes the above hardware, such as VMware, VirtualBox and QEMU (support for Microsoft Virtual PC is currently unavailable, but may be revived in the future).
As Windows NT 4.0 ran on MIPS, Alpha AXP, and PowerPC architectures in addition to the i386 architecture, and NT-derived operating systems such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have been ported to several architectures (i.e. AMD64, IA-32, and IA-64), ReactOS developers have also taken initial steps in view of portability. For example, support for a variant IA-32 architecture, the Xbox platform, was added to the 0.2.5 release, and efforts toward a ReactOS port on the PowerPC and the Xen architecture are also underway as of 2005. Also currently they are working on porting ReactOS for ARM platform with the hope for a pocketPC-type ReactOS which at this point can fit better than a full featured operating system.
Reference :
http://en.wikipedia.org
