After a slippery drive home (12 stressful hours from Minneapolis -> Kansas City, rather than the six it took me to get there on Friday), I finally have time to report a bit on WineConf.
First of all, I'd like to thank Codeweavers on behalf of those of us from ReactOS that attended the conference. It was really run well, with ample free food (always a requirement). I didn't even mind -5F as much as I thought!
There were about 35 Wine and ReactOS hackers there, and two days worth of presentations. I started getting serious questions about ReactOS the instant people figured out who I was. There was about a 50/50 split between people wanting to know what it was and people wondering why we are bothering to do this. There were a lot of interesting (and passionate) conversations about the role of Linux on the desktop, the stupidity of trying to clone the windows kernel, intellectual property considerations, etc. I can say that in all cases, the discussions were very positive and open. I'm certain that I didn't convince everyone, but just the opportunity to make the case was worthwhile.
The ReactOS presentation on Sunday morning went as well as can be expected, given the state of our code. I spoke from a prepared deck (http://plasmic.com/~vizzini) for about 15 or 20 minutes, and then we demonstrated various aspects of the system. Steven ran the demonstrations, which included showing off Explorer, Windows XP Notepad, and our installation system. Then, the four of us (Steven, Art, Mark, and me) took questions. Most of the questions this time around were very technical in nature, and there was at least one question (from Gavriel State, regarding our DIB engine), that pretty much stumped us (can one of the UI guys please comment?).
We had two crashes due to the floppy driver (well, also due to my stupidity at not configuring VMWare with a blank floppy disk image before starting), and one non-detected mouse incident. There was also a bit of a repainting problem, but on the whole, the system represented itself well.
There was a very interesting question brought up on Saturday morning by one of the Wine guys (Mike perhaps?) regarding running ReactOS inside Linux, like Win4Lin. I was skeptical at first, but having slept on it a day or two, I think this is a really cool idea. The proposal is that we adapt our own ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll to run correctly in user mode, just like user mode linux does, and use them to run the rest of a native Windows XP system. In other words, it replaces Win4Lin with free software, and it would be compatible with the current Windows OSes. Much investigating remains to be done, of course - I can't really even guess at the level of difficulty or time required at this point - but it is worth pursuing in my opinion.
Jan Kratochvil also joined us to present about his Captive NTFS project. For those that don't remember what this is, Jan got the ntfs.sys driver from Windows XP running in Linux, in part by using chunks of ReactOS code. Jan and I had some offline discussions as well about bringing Captive's improvements back into our tree, and about other captive-like projects that could be implemented. I expect a lot of focus will be applied to this area of Quasi-Wine, Quasi-ReactOS hacking over the next year.
All in all, it was a really great conference, and I'll definitely try to attend again next year. Presentations were good, conversations were interesting, people were friendly, and Minnesota at -5 was beautiful! ;-)
-Vizzini