Can we build a working OS from the code?
Yes! Many anons have built their own versions of Server2003, and XP-on-2003-kernel. /g/ actually managed to figure out how to get complete builds working (installing & booting successfully) less than a week after the leak showed up.
Unfortunately the process requires some files that don't have source included though, but these are all linked in the build guide below.
It's also worth pointing out that while the leak contained two different source trees (XPSP1, build 2600.1106 + Server2003 build 3790), we've currently only got Server2003 to make a complete working build, which is why this guide focuses more on Server2003 than XP.
This is probably a good thing anyway as the Server2003 code is almost a year newer than XPSP1, but it'd still be nice if XPSP1 could be made to work eventually...
What about 64-bit? Can I build x64 editions?#
64-bit support is kinda here, the leak has code for both IA64 & AMD64 processors, but while XP/Server2003 both released with IA64 versions from day one, AMD64 support was only added many years later with XP x64 & Server2003 SP1 (in other words, many years after this source code...)
IA64 support will probably work fine since the XP/Server2003 from the time of this source code had support for it (though afaik it hasn't actually been tried yet), but seems AMD64 was still in development at the time.
The v10 release of this guide improves support for making AMD64 builds, and some anons have even some success getting AMD64 builds to start booting, but unfortunately problems with Wow64 & possibly other things are preventing it from starting properly atm. (see amd64 build support section for more info)
What's needed to build? Do I need Visual Studio?#
Fortunately the complete build toolchain was included in the leak, all that's required is a Windows build machine running XP or later.
Visual Studio isn't needed, and currently there aren't any VS solution files/projects for interacting with the code, would be really nice to have them though...
Will this help get XP tools/kernel running on *nix?#
Unlikely since the tools are coded to work in a completely different environment, maybe if someone wanted to put in the months of work to port it over, but it's far from being code you can just copy-paste into *nix and then build.
Is this code going to help ReactOS/WINE in any way?#
No, those projects would never want to make use of such stolen/illegal code (ReactOS even performed their own year-long code audit when it was claimed that they used an older leaked codebase!).
Even hinting that you have knowledge of Windows internals learned through code like this is enough to disqualify you from contributing to them (on that note, if you ever want to work on ReactOS/WINE in the future you should probably quit looking into this source code while you still can!)
Was this from the passworded RAR I heard about?#
No, the passworded RAR was a completely different thing, which turned out to be fake.
Before the real leak came about some anons on /g/ were trying to
organise a source code collection for various OS's, with that collection
also containing a passworded windows_xp_source.rar file that was dug up after years of being unseeded (posted in ~2007), which some anons spent several weeks trying to crack.
Sometime after the nt5src file leaked the password for that RAR was eventually found, being internaldev,
which revealed that the RAR was nothing but a fake archive that made
use of similar directory structures to the older NT4 leak.
Unfortunately the weeks of posts about the lost-then-found RAR file being followed by an actual source code leak led many anons to confuse the two things as being the same, so just to emphasise: the passworded-rar has nothing to do with the recent leak!.
The confusion around the leaks is made even worse thanks to some faggot almost immediately deciding to repack the original nt5src.7z leak with different compression - using the exact same filename for his repacked version - and then making the first torrent of the leak contain that repack instead of the original. Needless to say this led to a ton of arguments filling up the threads which I won't go into here.