The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.9, the latest in our accelerated cadence targeting a release every three months.
While a consequence of this faster cycle might mean fewer headliner changes, much of the visible effort nowadays comes in the form of quality-of-life improvements in how ReactOS functions. At the same time work continues on the underlying systems which provide more subtle improvements such as greater system stability and general consistency.
The biggest new “feature” is something we already talked about: ReactOS is now self-hosting.
I wanted to give it a spin, at least in VMware. I wanted to see which of my win32 apps run, or don’t.
The installer hangs at the language selection screen. Shit.
OT
I have never understood why many open source projects begins adding extras (to me multiple languages is an extra) before the core systems is fully working.
Home made operating systems with a working GUI and font supporting text rendering but with no or badly working filesystem support isn’t too uncommon as an example.
It’s easier to find a bilingual person than it is to find a decent NT kernel programmer
The123king,
Yes and no, windows still has a lot of kernel driver developers. Personally I stopped doing windows kernel development when microsoft began locking indy devs out of their own machines. Ironically this gave me the kick I needed to pick up linux.
I’d consider doing kernel development for reactos, I wonder how much reactos pays though? I suspect it’s significantly less than windows devs, otherwise I’m sure they could find many thousands of us for the right price
Internationalization is a hard problem, and getting it wrong in the beginning means redoing a lot of work, or having incredibly hackish compatibility layers to add it in.
It’ll also stress some of the GUI positioning stuff, so it can act as a decent test for that.
Linux is still a way better option to run Win32 apps without Windows (via WINE – ReactOS reuses the WINE code anyway). ReactOS is like chasing the moving target which is faster than the chaser
There used to be a VMware ready image also released with the ISOs. It seems that ReactOS has not done this for the last few releases. They now have a how-to page ( https://reactos.org/wiki/VMware ).
There is an interesting not about the configuration of the hard disk image:
“When you create a new virtual machine using the VMware Player you should chose the operating system (OS) as “Windows XP Professional”. The reason for this is that this causes the creation of an IDE hard disk drive which works with ReactOS. If you choose “Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition” (which is the ReactOS target OS) this will cause VMware to create a SCSI hard disk drive which will cause a “Setup could not find a harddisk.” error.”
Maybe there is something to investigate more?
If you can have EIDE, SATA and SCSI HDDs but only support one of those I think the problem is well know.
ReactOS runs really well in Qemu. I’ve found that it handles Z order better than WINE does so I can run 3D Studio Max and Caligari trueSpace better than WINE can. ReactOS will continue to progress as it always has. It’s good to see more alternatives to Windows being developed.
For some rather loose meaning of “really well”?
(does it reliably support sound by now, for example?)
Edited 2018-07-27 00:50 UTC
Excellent to see ReactOS is still making progress and they have come a long way. I have followed them through the year and I hope continue to get better…