ReactOS, an operating system meant to be a free, simpler windows replacement may have potential for the future, If the project reaches it's goal, it will be fully compatible with windows applications. Users of WINE for GNU/Linux should listen: Fully compatible. Of course, emulating the complex win32 API is a difficult task, and ReactOS is currently in the alpha stage. Since I often use pre-release software, I installed Sun's virtualbox and gave it a go. The OS ran smoothly given only 128 MB of ram, and didn't complain about the 2 GB disc space quota. Installation was quick, although it struggled on 128 mb of ram, and had trouble taking my input to set an admin password (I resorted to "a").
As I noted earlier, it ran smoothly with the preinstalled software, including a web browser called ReactOS Explorer. The main interface looks like windows classic, with the square start button and the gray taskbar. Using the ReactOS downloader that looks a bit like the synaptic package manager in debian based linux such as ubuntu, I downloaded firefox 3, installed without a problem, but noticed a big problem upon opening it: the text looked very weird, and letters often overlapped each other. After figuring out that it was not my configuration, I tried firefox 2, a version said to work better. It wouldn't even install. At that point, I concluded that ReactOS really means "not ready for everyday use", although I will like to see version 0.5, which will be a "beta".
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