#Install reactos install#
#Install reactos upgrade#
#Install reactos software#
#Install reactos Pc#

As an example it has Firefox version 48, which when I followed Firefox’s upgrade prompt downloaded version 52.0.3 ESR that installed but completely failed to start. Typically the version of a package in the repository is an older version that works, but any upgrades fail to work.

#Install reactos software#

It is in its software support that you are reminded that ReactOS isn’t quite the Windows you are used to. There is plenty of choice, so I set to downloading a few programs. This doubles as the Windows “Add/Remove Programs” Control Panel item. It doesn’t have much in the way of built-in software, but unlike the “real” Windows of the XP era it comes with a package manager of the type you’d expect with a GNU/Linux distro. They are at pains to stress that this version is still very much a pre-release alpha, but in navigating round its built-in GUI features and programs you’d be forgiven for thinking it was feature-complete compared to the Windows versions it is most similar to. Like Windows, But With A Built-In Free Software Repository Speed-wise its difficult to judge because I had it running in qemu rather than on native hardware, however on my few-year-old i7 running a recent Ubuntu version it was perfectly usable though admittedly a little slow. This has been a fully functioning desktop GUI operating system for quite a few generations now, and by the looks of it is a whisker away from its aim of creating that open-source Windows NT clone. Everything is exactly where you’d expect it, and since the version text in the bottom corner states it is reporting as Windows NT 5.3, or 64-bit Windows XP Professional, I’m guessing it has more influence from that OS than Windows 2000. Aside from the ReactOS logo on the start menu it’s indistinguishable from Windows XP with the classic theme, at least as I remember it.

#Install reactos Pc#

My first impression was that I was back in a Windows PC circa 2003 sporting the grey-and-blue Windows 95-style classic theme, such is their success at creating a clone of Windows from that era. I found I needed greater than a 1 GB qemu partition to have space enough for extra software, but it ran happily enough with the gigabyte of memory I allocated to it.

#Install reactos install#

The qemu install was faultless though, and I was soon in the ReactOS desktop. I don’t blame it for not running on the Dell, it doesn’t yet claim to have anything near comprehensive hardware support. I downloaded the former, and first tried to install it on an old Dell Core Duo laptop which it failed to do, before creating an image to install it in a qemu environment. There are two ReactOS ISOs, an installer, and a live CD. It’s 2003, And Hackaday Hasn’t Started Yet If it wasn’t for the ReactOS logo, you’d swear this was a Windows box.

The result was both a peek at the current state of the project, and a chance to think about the place of a Windows clone in 2020. Version 0.4.13 is the latest in a long line of incremental updates, and remembering those early ReactOS ISOs when I saw their announcement, I thought I’d give it a spin. ReactOS is very much still with us, and indeed has just seen a new release. You might think that in the nearly two decades since then it would have become an irrelevance and its contributors moved on to other work, but no. One of the ISOs I remember downloading back then was an early version of ReactOS, a project with the lofty aim of creating an open-source equivalent of Windows NT. A couple of decades ago that was how we’d take a look at a new Linux distro, and at the time we considered it to be nothing short of incredible that such a thing was possible. Do you remember when trying a new OS meant burning a CD? Not merely downloading an ISO and mounting it on a USB drive, but taking a circle of polycarbonate and hoping you didn’t get a buffer underrun as the file you’d spent an entire day downloading was burned onto it.