[Lazarus] Lazarus, ReactOS etc.

[Sven Barth]

Am 16.03.2011 11:12, schrieb Mark Morgan Lloyd:
> 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.

Do you mean this in a positive or negative way?
If you mean it in a negative way, then I must tell you that they marked 
it Alpha exactly because it's not fully working (this is also written on 
the front page).

> 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.

The request to download Gecko comes from Wine's MSHTML version. You can 
simply cancel that. As long as you don't use an application that makes 
use of IE's backend, you shouldn't need it.

> 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).
>

After all ReactOS is designed to be a NT5.2 ;) (aka Windows 2003)

> 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.
>

Now that I have a machine that's better suited for VMs I'll need to 
investigate a bit more here :D

> 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.).
>

May I ask you where you read that about Sanos? I'm reading around at the 
reactos.org forum and mailing lists quite a bit and have not yet read 
anything about that OS.

> 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.
>

Regards,
Sven