ReactOS Archive

I would like to announce the arrival of a newsletter for the ReactOS operating system. It covers and summarizes the activities on IRC, the mailing lists, and CVS. Splash will come out on a roughly bi-weekly basis, sometimes weekly.

Some have claimed to release a product called Ekush a Windows replacement Operating System. The problem is that it uses code from ReactOS, Wine, Qemu and Freetype without obeying the GPL or LGPL that ReactOS and Wine use as their license.

"ReactOS is an open source (GPL) operating system built to be compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. ReactOS is currently just a development platform; it is not a useful desktop system for the average user in any way, but it has potential." Read the review at NewsForge.

This ReactOS release features the new LiveCD image, improved and more stable kernel and win32k kernel graphics subsystem, lots of networking foundation work, improved setup and better bundled explorer, command shell and drivers. Also included is newly ported user DLL code from WINE.

ReactOS, the open source operating system which is compatible with Windows NT/2000 applications and drivers has been released.

ReactOS 0.2.2 RC-1 is out. Many screenshots of the CVS version are available here.

There is a (German) article in the online edition to the largest and longest running political magazine of Germany, the "Spiegel", about ReactOS. Definetely good publicity for the OSS hobby OS.

ReactOS 0.2 was released recently and this time it sports a new GUI. This short review with screenshots, shows some of the new improvements in this release. A huge improvement is that this release of ReactOS has some Win32 compatibility being able to run Solitaire and Winamp.

ReactOS 0.2 RC1 has been released. The 0.2 release has the goal of booting into a functional Explorer.exe - replacing the default of a text command line interface. The final release should be on the 25th of January. The release features more additions and fixes than the ability to boot into explorer. For a complete listing, view the release changelog.

This message was posted in the ReactOS mailing list: "For those of you who haven't followed the progress with Explorer closely, take a look here. This screenshot was taken with current CVS and Filip's Wine DLL snapshot here. There are still many stability problems (lots of multi-threading issues), unimplemented and buggy ReactOS features, but all in all we're much better shape than I had expected to be at this point in time. If we can keep up this pace, 0.2 will be on time (before WineConf) and will rock!" UPDATE: Quake2 running on ReactOS.

ReactOS 0.1.5 has been released, featuring many improvements and fixes. The new release includes lots of work on the graphical DLLs, as well as all round work on the system. French and German keyboard layouts are now also available.

ReactOS 0.1.4 has been released. This release was created using a week-long branch for fixes only - followed up by several days of a code feeze for testing. The release itself features Plug n Play improvements, better GUI controls (especially scrollbars and static controls), better mouse button handling, the beginning of OpenGL support, extensive work on a PC Net driver as well as an improved NDIS driver, the serial mouse driver was almost rewritten and there is now partial support for the intellimouse along with better SCSI support (SCSI devices initialized using 3rd party drivers).

For those that have no idea what ReactOS is, Flexbeta took some time and explained it, covered it’s current status and write about where they plan to go. See the full review here.

ReactOS 0.1.2 has been released and features many improvements. Basic Java (console and AWT)/Mono (console) apps can run, several 3rd party video drivers for Windows NT 4 can be loaded - and there are many other improvements.