ReactOS as a 32bit Open Watcom Dev Environment
I was having problems with the old Windows XP VM I use to compile Open Watcom (OW) boot projects. This VM is an image of my original XP Desktop install that I have IDA and a lot of unused junk, so I decided to build a barebones VM for just using OW compiling. Initially, I was going to use a Windows 7 install as a lightweight single purpose solution; however, that turned out to be a real pain. Even using a real DVD on Windows 7 seemed to be more trouble than it was worth, so I looked for another option. I finally settled on setting up and giving a ReactOS VM.
I was incredibly surprised that this worked very well. The VM is lightweight, and I have not had many issues of concern. The VM does not seem to restore correctly from a VirtualBox save, but loading is so fast it really does not matter. My work setup for this project is to code in Visual Studio Code for Linux with the source on a Synology NAS share. The share is mounted (systemd automount) in my home directory. The ReactOS VM shares this directory for access to the source and the VM mounts a FAT16 vdi which is my test image that gets booted using Bochs emulator running from a bash shell on my Linux system.
The workflow is to code in VS Code (on Linux), compile and copy the binary to the FAT16 vdi image using the ReactOS VM, and run the test system using Bochs (Linux) using its internal debugger.
Thank you for the warm words. Glad to see some first real-world usage to evolve for our Operating System in Alpha Stage. Still be prepared for the unexpected. And backup regularly!
A question, is it any safer or less safe to use one of the nightly builds?