Submitted by The ReactOS team has released version 0.3.7 of its Windows NT compatible operating system.
This release along with the rest of the 0.3.x series is still considered alpha quality software. ReactOS 0.3.7 continues further work on the main three principles of current ReactOS development: bugfixes, compatibility and stability.
The release announcement sums up the most import changes in this slightly delayed release:
- 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
The changelog for this new release is rather huge and detailed, so if you’re interested in the nitty gritty, indulge yourself. You can download ReactOS from the website’s download page.
Yesterday Obama president; today new Reactos release. This is a good week
Can’t wait for the beta release…BTW, will Reactos need an antivirus? Or will userland be completely isolated from the system file tree?
Reactos FTW!
Anti-virus will be recommended.
It’s not just the OS that needs AV protection, it’s also the software that runs on it and the users which use it.
norton herpes antivirus?
but to be serious i have enjoyed playing with reactOS and it’s onl gotten better.
yay for bringing politics into something that isnt remotely related! woo!
I agree, not all of us think the outcome of this election is a good thing.
My investment account certainly doesn’t.
Well… I agree that politics should not be brought into it, but your statement that politics has nothing to do with development simply is bullshit.
Legislature, funding, research etc… are all areas a government covers. Stating that this does not affect a project like ReactOS in the slightest is wrong.
hey, guess what. The car industry also affects the development of reactOS in a round about way as well!
Sorry if I’m being a bit dumb here, but I don’t really get the point of ReactOS. They’re trying to emulate Windows perfectly, if I’m not misunderstanding their goals. Well, to do that, wouldn’t they have to implement not only all the Windows APIs, but all their inconsistencies as well? What about the various bugs in the API that software can take advantage of, don’t we need those? What about the undocumented APIs that MS sometimes uses? We complain that Windows is bloated, won’t ReactOS have the same problems when it’s finished? I’m not trying to troll, I’m genuinely confused and I may be completely mistaken here.
The point is that ReactOS is free and open source. Microsoft has killed XP in favor of Vista and Windows 7.
The remainder of your questions can best be answered by going to the ReactOS site and reading up on it. The roadmap is all laid out quite well.
Edited 2008-11-06 13:57 UTC
XP isn’t dead yet…
Yes, the whole API is being targeted, including bugs, incosistincies, undocumented API, etc.
Wine has the same goal, the only difference being that Wine provide the top layer, ReactOS also provide the whole OS that sits under that layer.
It may have similar problems as MS Windows, but it’s OSS, so it’s free as in beer and as is in freedom. That alone makes me happy.
I’ll admit to not necessarily agreeing with that viewpoint, but I understand. Open source is a very good thing, as it promotes competition and growth. But I have to wonder why, rather than putting their design time into FOSS programs that really could use it, they’re replicating something that already exists? They’re not trying to improve Windows, they’re trying to duplicate it at least in the ABI and API respects.
I just don’t get it, and that’s my failing. At least Wine made sense to me, but this… well, to me it doesn’t. This doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t do it, it just means I don’t get the point in duplicating something that’s already there. As I said, I do not intend this as flame bate, though I’m sure I’ll get my fair share.
The point is to have a free, open source replacement for Windows that is not under Microsoft’s control, won’t be end-of-lifed arbitrairly, and will run the huge catalog of Windows Compatible software.
I have tons of systems here I could give away to friends or to charity, but I can’t afford to buy a $99US Windows XP license for each of them to do so.
Imagine a computer for impovershed areas of the world that will run Windows software, but no MS tax.
Imagine using ReactOS in a free VM to run Windows compatible software under Linux or MacOS X?
Imagine a Windows Compatible OS without the bloat and cruft that slows Windows down? ReactOS will run well on systems where XP and above are slow as sloths.
But your viewpoint is invalidated by Linux. Linux replicates an OS that already existed, Unix. It even used Minux’s userland until version 0.12.
ReactOS is no difference then Linux, other than being based on Windows, and Linux was designed to be Unix-like.
Also, they can’t improve on Windows, until they can duplicate the functionality of Windows. For a long time Linux trailed Unix, but now, I think Linux is ahead of most Unix’s.
There is one huge difference between ReactOS and Linux. Linux never set out to be binary or even source code compatible with any existing Unix implementation.
That’s not that big of a difference, Lots of OSS projects are binary compatible with their proprietary realtives, Haiku, for example.
ReactOS has no choice but to try and be binary compatible, as the source code for most of its applications are not available.
It was different for Linux, as the source code for 99% of it’s apps are available, so you can compile it from source, or build a package.
It’s just a difference in circumstances and implementation, not a difference in spirit.
Edited 2008-11-07 16:20 UTC
but Linus did set out to be POSIX compliant.
For instance, there are plenty of DOSes (MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, PTS-DOS, ROM-DOS, RxDOS, FreeDOS) as well as DOSBox or DOSEMU or QEMU or BOCHS or any (IA32) Windows. They all had different developers, licenses, costs, requirements, and some are no longer supported.
DOSBox, in particular, needs no real DOS but is (at best) a slow 486 and targeted only at games (and needs a host OS and lots of libs). FreeDOS was created to duplicate native DOS with minimal requirements and also improve upon it, mostly to have a free/libre version since others weren’t (its kernel + BASE are GPLv2). DOSEMU is meant to run at near native speed under Linux (typically w/ FreeDOS) although isn’t as good for multimedia as DOSBox (in my limited experience). Oh, and native DOS has limited support for AC97 while something like DOSBox just uses native OS drivers for that, etc.
Don’t worry, WINE and ReactOS have their reasons, and they wisely pool their resources, so either way should hopefully be a viable solution in the future. Some people prefer the Windows way of doing things over Linux. (Honestly, DOS itself is hard to 100% duplicate, so I’m not surprised it takes so long for cloning Windows.)
Edited 2008-11-06 22:10 UTC
As it is, 99% of what I do works fine under Linux. However, I do have some legacy Windows software for which I haven’t found a Linux replacement. Specifically, I have a program for drawing house floor plans. If anyone knows of a Linux equivalent, I’d love to hear about it. If I could run my floor plan program under ReactOS, I could say goodbye to Windows forever.
A friend of mine runs a Windows box only for AutoCad. The closest Linux replacement, QCad, isn’t quite good enough for his purposes. So if ReactOS could run AutoCad, it would prove useful to him.
Ideally, I’d just like to see a Linux version of these few old useful Windows apps. If we had that, Linux would be able to replace Windows on everyone’s desktop.
You assume everyone actually wants to replace their Windows desktop with Linux.
I for one would rather change my career and give up computers than swap Windows for Linux.