So I thought I’d look for the latest release build of ReactOS, and give it a whirl. Â First I download 61112, and installed it on Qemu 1.7rc2 on OS X. Â First I gave the VM a 500MB disk, and 500MB of ram… which led to the thing using the whole disk for paging and was terribly unstable, and all around no good.
So next I got smart, used 64MB of ram, and a 1Gig disk, installed then turned off swap. Â Now it is more usable. Â I thought I’d do something crazy, and install Visual C++ 4.0. Â The installer works, except there is no progress, and it can’t create program groups. Â No problem I think as it does the same thing on CrossOver(wine). Â I download my QWDOS project with firefox, extract, and open the makefile and… all the menus are blanked out. Â And dropping down to the CLI, although the installer ‘registered environment variables’ the compiler wasn’t in the path. Â Clearly registry information is dropping.
NO Build for you!
So falling back to nmake I can at least compile my release build, and amazingly -it works!
QWDOS Win32 on ReactOS
So is it perfect? No far from it, but it certainly is a lot more usable than it was a year ago.