On January 25 , 2004 ReactOS 0.2.0 was released. This is the first version to include its GUI shell - ReactOS Explorer. It is also capable of running a few simple Win32 GUI applications.

ReactOS is a clone of the Windows NT operating system that is still in early development. Unlike other popular non Microsoft OSes it is not Unix-ish and is designed to run Windows 32-bit applications natively. Additionally it is designed to be compatible with Windows NT device drivers.

An interesting fact to keep in mind: Microsoft's success started with a clone of Digital Research's CP/M.

This is the ReactOS boot screen (from the Bochs image)

ReactOS is available as a Bochs / VMWare image, an ISO CD image that includes an NT-like installer, and as binaries that can be bootstrapped from DOS.

These screen shots were taken inside Bochs. Bochs, being an OS debugging utility / emulator, runs very slowly. Running inside VMWare is much more impressive, especially since ReactOS can use the NT 4 VMWare video driver to display at much better video resolutions.

Right now installing video drivers is a serious hack, but it currently works (more or less) with the VMWare video driver, the Nvidia TNT video driver, and supposedly the NT 4 basic VGA driver.

ReactOS comes with its own basic VGA video driver, which is what is used here. This is more technically impressive because what you see here is 100% pure ReactOS with no one else's stuff added.

This is the desktop that comes up when you start ReactOS.

It has a start menu, although much of it does not work yet.

The "Explore" option or the "My Computer" icon brings up the ReactOS Explorer, which is kind of a cross between the Windows Explorer and the Windows 3.x File Manager. It seems kind of odd, but it makes more sense than managing your files with a web browser!

This screen shot shows Windows Notepad running under ReactOS. It seems to work fairly well except the pull down menus for all applications are not currently working right now.

The Command Prompt icon starts the ReactOS command interpreter. Since the GUI shell addition is still brand new this is still needed.

It runs everybody's favorite application, solitaire!
For some reason ReactOS includes its own cards.dll file which contain custom graphics.

Freecell also runs. (Using the function keys since menus don't work).

Attempting to run the Flying Stars screen saver. It starts to run but seems to freeze up.

As far as web browsers go Pathworks Mosaic gets to the splash screen and then hangs. At least I though that was as far as they went, it seems somebody got the Mozilla WinEmbed application to run, although I couldn't get that to work.

ReactOS does contain some networking stuff, but it doesn't work yet.

Attempting to shut down ReactOS. Apparently this this not fully implemented yet as selecting "yes" seems to do nothing.