Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life
-2014-04-08, in 7 days. But there are heaps of machines still running
-Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and
-upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it
-comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a
-new operating system. Some obvious options (buy new a Windows
-machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine)
-are already well known and covered elsewhere. Most of them involve
-leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and
-trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want
-to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and
-the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software
-operating system that is Windows XP compatible.
-
-
ReactOS is a free software
-operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating
-system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows
-programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly.
-The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines,
-drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating
-system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing. It is
-a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different
-from the approach taken by the Wine
-project, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on
-Linux.
-
-
The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most
-shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already.
-There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux,
-allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple
-click directly from the Internet. Check out the
-screen shots on the
-project web site for an idea what it look like (it looks just like
-Windows before metro).
-
-
I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like
-operating systems. I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager
-virtual machine. The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working
-fine as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, my main test application
-is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which
-seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on
-the disk after the installation. So no luck with that test software.
-No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem.
-I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed
-to work just fine. If you like Windows and want to keep running your
-old Windows binaries, check it out by
-downloading the
-installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine
-image.
-