Our development team is pleased to announce the 9th increment of the
0.3 series of ReactOS, an open source Windows® compatible operating
system.
As we draw ever closer to the 0.4 series, more and more work is being
put into bugfixing existing code in an effort to get more
applications and drivers working. This release is testament to that
and is our most compatible release to date. However, the development
team have still been working on expanding the features alongside
bugfixing existing features, and quite a few additions have found
their way into this release. 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.
Along with the rest of the 0.3 series, this release is still
considered alpha quality software so it may not run all your apps or
run on your hardware.
A detailed consolidation of all changes can be found in the changelog
(http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/Changelog-0.3.9). A sum up of
some of the more important changes is as follows:
* Reduced minimum memory requirement to 32Mb. In theory ReactOS
can now be installed with 24Mb and run with only 20Mb
* A new, faster Hyperspace Mapping Interface has been
implemented in the kernel resulting in a speed improvement of over 300%
* Security check improvements to the Object Manager in the
kernel improves performance by 500%. Noticeable during large file/
registry operations
* Various NDIS and AFD problems have been solved which increase
compatibility with 3rd party NIC drivers and hardening of the network
stack
* Preliminary support for sound via the new Kernel Streaming
service. It's now possible to use the ac97 driver via our new Port
Class library to play sound bytes using winamp
* A great deal of work has been put into the command prompt to
make it much more compatible. It's now able to run very complex
scripts, including our own Build Environment
* Many bugfixes to the kernel mode portion of the GDI resulting
in much improved drawing engine across all bit depths
* Synchronization of most of the Wine usermode DLLs
Main news link: http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_51.html
Download link: http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html
--
Aleksey Bragin
ReactOS Foundation President
http://www.reactos.org
