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For those not following this project it is a FOSS reimplementation of the Win32 interface, which supports a great deal of humanity's historical computational effort. The new ReactOS release has reached 0.42 and the filesystems ext, btrfs are apparently RW, though Reiserfs and UFS are readonly mounts, successful systems have been shown running.
A nice gallery of some successfully run high profile applications is here (e.g. SimCity and PhotoshopCS2 !!), although interesting, not why I am reporting this.
There are an *enormous* number of scientific instruments (not just microscopes, but various scanners, PCR decks , robots) which originally came with a Win32 driver disk, and have since gone out of business or stopped support. There might only be a single run instance on a crusty old i386 (yes, I've seen that!!).
This is an ambitious project and of course depends on the effective WINE project. It deserves some specific credit and visibility, for providing a possible threshold in the future that sufficient OLD applications can be run independent of the new Microsoft "One OS to rule them All", that it may be possible to construct hybrid machines running Linux, and sufficient driver support from ReactOS to manage the old device drivers that WINE may find difficult to reverse engineer.
But in general, more OS choice's are a good thing!
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 29 2016, @05:25PM
I completely disagree. Running in an old-fashioned pre-XP Windows environment is not a desirable thing. There's issues of IT support, keeping the system updated, network connectivity and file transfers, etc. And further fragmentation is not a good thing.
What they should be working on is 1) improving WINE so that it'll run all this crappy proprietary Win32 software these machines run, and 2) developing a device driver translation layer so that the custom device drivers these machines use can be run on Linux. This will give you both software and hardware compatibility, but allow you to run on any Linux machine you want, and will allow you to continue to update your Linux machine (both the hardware and the software) while still running the same proprietary Win32 application and any custom hardware it interfaces to. The main problem will be when their custom hardware simply isn't capable of being easily connected to a modern PC: an example of that is old ISA expansion cars, which can't be plugged into a modern PCI/PCIe motherboard, but even here I do believe there's PCI-to-ISA adapters out there for exactly this reason. For the device drivers, we already have an example of something like this being done: remember when Linux WiFi drivers all ran under NDISwrapper? That was exactly the same situation: people wanted to run WiFi hardware in Linux, but didn't have Linux drivers available, so they made a wrapper allowing them to run Windows drivers. It should be possible to do the same thing here, but in a more generalized way.
Instead of trying to make a closed-off, all-in-one solution to this problem, we need a building-block approach that allows us to use these blocks in any kind of system we want; these can then be integrated into more complete systems, much like how LinuxCNC can be run on any Linux system you want without too much trouble (install the software and build a kernel with the realtime extensions), but the LinuxCNC developers provide a Debian-based all-in-one system if you want to use theirs.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday August 29 2016, @08:16PM
Well, then the good news is that in theory if ReactOS gets enough traction you won't have any of those problems. When that happens, you will be running an up-to-date operating system that can handle all of that and maintain compatiblity with Windows based hardware and software.
I'm so glad that you and the other poster seem to know what everyone should specifically be doing. Someone should make you the manager of Earth. :P
The whole NDISWrapper thing was sort of a fluke really. NDIS is an oddly standard driver interface that originated with 3COM, and was then used across DOS, Windows, and Windows NT. So it has some cross platform-ness already baked in to it. This is not the case with most other driver classes.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 29 2016, @10:20PM
You don't need the driver to be cross-platform, you just have to figure out the driver API and write a translation layer for that. If you're making a Windows clone, then you're already doing that basically.
And no, ReactOS isn't going to "get enough traction" with its tiny little team and little interest. There isn't enough money or interest from people who want to keep clunky old Windows-based manufacturing and scientific equipment running to fund that; if there were, the team wouldn't be complaining about funding and resources like they are. Companies in that position will happily use a free solution if it exists, but if it means shelling out a bunch of money as a contribution, they'll sooner just junk the equipment and buy a new one. You're not going to get a lot of people wanting to work for free on this project, because honestly, who the fuck wants to spend their spare time making a clone of Windows 2000?
If you think it's such a great project, then you can spend your time working on it. I'm just pointing out how with their limited resources, they could have a much more positive effect by creating some smaller building blocks rather than trying to clone an entire OS that no one is really gung-ho about using unless they're forced to.