OS Revolution

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ReactOS

ReactOS 0.3.10

Aleksey Bragin announced the 0.3.10 release of ReactOS, the Free Software replacement for Microsoft Windows(TM).

It features a new Universal ATA driver as the default disk driver that allows support for Serial ATA and partitions greater than 8GB.
Also there's a lot of work done on increasing USB compatibility.

Release Date: 
Sun, 2009-07-05

ReactOS 0.3.9

The team from ReactOS is getting close to the magic 0.4 release.
They've solved a lot of problems and two key areas which stand out are the much improved network stack and the emergence of sound support in the kernel via the new kernel streaming services.

Announcement | Changelog | Download

Release Date: 
Sun, 2009-04-26

General Presentation

ReactOS is a computer operating system intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows NT versions 5.x and up (Windows 2000 and its successors). It is claimed to be composed entirely of free software, by means of a complete clean room reverse engineering process, with an extensive on-going audit, being undertaken to protect against claims made by those outside the project.

Although the project is in the alpha development stage as of 2009, many Windows programs already work well. While the ReactOS kernel has been written from scratch, the userland is partially based on the Wine compatibility layer for Unix-like operating systems.

ReactOS is primarily written in the C programming language. Various components of ReactOS are licensed under the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser General Public License and the BSD License.

ReactOS 0.3.8

Thu, 2009-02-05 22:59

Aleksey Bragin announced the 0.3.8 release of ReactOS a Free Software replacement for Microsoft Windows(TM).

Change Summary:

  • Various bugfixes and enhancements to Kernel core services (e.g. registry, system information routines, sync primitives like guarded mutex, IO support and other)
  • An initiative has been started to fix the remaining unstable parts of the kernel: Memory Manager, caching code and filesystems driver APIs and other dependencies of Mm
  • Introduction of a new Portable Structured Exception Handling mechanism (PSEH 2.0), which is much closer to the native compiler SEH syntax
  • A few longstanding bugs are fixed (such as multipartition HDD support by LiveCD, Task Manager CPU graph)
  • Various GDI drawing problems were fixed
  • A minimal open source version of the KernelDebugger protocol has been implemented, allowing basic MS WinDbg functionality
  • CRT and RTL library improvements
  • A number of problems were fixed in base system drivers: NPFS, CDFS, FASTFAT, FS_REC, SCSIPORT
  • Video driver improvements for better real hardware support
  • Ongoing Win32-subsystem work
  • Continued work on supporting MSVC
  • Build tool chain fixes and improvements (also as part of the MSVC support work)
  • Core tools and components shared with Wine were updated to the latest version

Announcement | Changelog | Download

Author: CoolGoose

ReactOS Year in Review

Sun, 2009-01-18 20:53

The team for ReactOS posted a Year in Review article.

2008 saw a total of four point releases by the ReactOS project, all of which were made after the kernel rewrite was completed. Thus the instabilities people saw in the 0.3.1 release were greatly reduced and there were better rates of success in running ROS on real hardware and not just virtual machines. That is not to say the system runs reliably, but we have gotten closer. The number of releases is certainly higher than in previous years, as the project stalled for a time due to the instabilities in the kernel.

As everyone can see, 2008 has been very busy for us, with continuing advancement in development and the laying of foundations for new initiatives that we hope will bear fruit in the future. In addition, efforts begun years ago are also starting to show results, making ReactOS more functional and more stable. Here we will highlight some of the advancements and efforts that may be of interest to the community.

Author: CoolGoose

ReactOS 0.3.7 Released

Wed, 2008-11-05 23:48

Aleksey Bragin announced the 0.3.7 release of ReactOS.

Highlights from the changelog:

  • Improved x64 architecture support
  • The start of a real MSVC compiler support project
  • Kernel improvements and bugfixes in quite a few parts: Configuration Manager, IO Manager, KE, Memory Manager, Object Manager, Process Manager
  • Network stack improvements: leakage fixes, increased functionality
  • Filesystem driver fixes, making them more compatible with the Microsoft NT cache manager
  • Win32 subsystem improvements and synching of most of the Wine usermode DLLs

Announcement | Download | Changelog

Author: CoolGoose
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