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ReactOS 0.4.13 released
by Colin Finck 10 Apr '20

10 Apr '20

The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.13. As with prior releases, keywords are noted representing the release itself and highlighting key improvements. In this particular case, the 0.4.13 version shows the results of significant hard work to bring improvements to the USB stack, further development on the Xbox port boot process, an Explorer File Search for the Shell module, as well as many other changes. https://reactos.org/img/project-news/reactos-0413-released/banner.png USB Improvements ================ USB (Universal Serial Bus) is an important standard adopted throughout the industry and used widely on many devices such as external storage, keyboards, mice, and various other devices. Notably, there are a great number of computers that do not come with a CD-ROM drive these days, with the only option being USB in order to boot or install an operating system. The USB stack itself is arguably a very complicated one, the code to support it is complex, and maintaining it is not an easy task. ReactOS currently lags behind an advanced USB implementation as various bugs and regressions still plague the system. Despite this, many people have worked hard and contributed code to improve USB functionality in ReactOS. Vadim Galyant and Victor Perevertkin have brought in a new USB stack which provides many fixes as well as improvements to various areas, improving USB support in general. Although there is a long journey ahead towards an advanced and perfectly functional USB stack within ReactOS, the new module already supports HID and storage devices. Explorer File Search Bring-Up ============================= The graphical shell (aka Explorer) is a vital component that allows the user to interact with the system. The shell itself, though, lacks a lot of stuff which deeply limits the overall ability for the user to interact with the system in an easy and flexible way. However, with work done during the Google Summer of Code 2019, the shell has seen a new feature implemented - file search. Thanks to student Brock Mammen, this feature will help the user find the exact location of a file without the hassle of having to search for content manually or to rely on third-party programs. The screenshot below demonstrates the search feature in action: https://reactos.org/img/project-news/reactos-0413-released/file-search.png Xbox ReactOS Port Improvements ============================== Once upon a time, ReactOS had an Xbox architecture port specifically to boot ReactOS onto the first generation of Xbox console hardware. With ReactOS code making significant changes over time, the port was not maintained and had been largely ignored by developers who were focused on other issues. Due to the significant amount of changes in various areas that ReactOS was receiving, it was discovered that the OS could no longer boot on Xbox hardware. Now, this is no longer the case as ReactOS contributor Stanislav Motylkov, with the help from Matt Borgerson, have brought changes to the port which show tremendous improvement. And as is often the case with porting code to a new system, the work has also helped ReactOS more broadly by exposing nasty bugs in some fundamental modules of the system. The following screenshot shows ReactOS running in an Xbox emulator, XQEMU: https://reactos.org/img/project-news/reactos-0413-released/xqemu.jpg FreeLoader FAT Boot Speed-Up ============================ In past releases, booting ReactOS on a system that was partitioned using the FAT filesystem could be a burden, as you had to wait some time for ReactOS to boot. FreeLoader (the ReactOS bootloader) has to do a lot of stuff in order to get ReactOS ready for boot, but unfortunately it was doing this in an unoptimized way. In this release, Victor Perevertkin did a great job optimizing the FAT driver of FreeLoader, significantly improving the boot speed when using this filesystem for USB-RAM boot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEsNzuXzcHQ Accessibility ============= In the area of accessibility in ReactOS, new software was introduced - the Accessibility Utility Manager. Developed by ReactOS contributor Bi?oc George, the Accessibility Utility Manager, as the name implies, manages the accessibility applications of ReactOS. The following screenshot shows the program in operation: https://reactos.org/img/project-news/reactos-0413-released/accessibility.png Similarly, the On-Screen Keyboard has seen some improvements to theming support and there have been some additional features and minor bug fixes in the Magnifier. Font Management =============== Developer Katayama Hirofumi has continued his work to bring ReactOS’ font support closer to that of Windows. With the merging of two large pull requests, system font management is now done via the registry rather than in an ad-hoc way. This brings improved compatibility and stability to ReactOS. Other Improvements ================== Besides the highlighted points of this release, we should not forget that the whole of ReactOS - components such as DLLs, applications, and other modules have been improved. In addition to the improvements to accessibility features mentioned above, Bi?oc George also fixed some common dialog boxes where the “Apply” button enabled itself unconditionally even though the user had not taken any action. Furthermore, he also fixed an issue regarding disk space where the Recycle Bin could occupy more than the available disk space. The 64-bit ReactOS build is getting better and better such that now ReactOS is fully booting and working in an x64 environment thanks to Timo Kreuzer’s work continuing to progress further. Third Party Syncs ================= ReactOS is an open source project that collaborates with various other open source projects all around the globe. The following list shows the 3rd party libraries that other projects share with ReactOS, and with the responsible committers that have synced the libraries with the ReactOS project. * BtrFS v1.4 by Pierre Schweitzer * ACPICA v20190816 by Thomas Faber * UniATA v0.47a by Thomas Faber * mbedTLS v2.7.11 by Thomas Faber * libpng v1.6.37 by Thomas Faber Statistics ========== JIRA Issues fixed of this release - 278 Number of commits as of this release - 1282 Oldest issue fixed as of this release - CORE-4995 * Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0413-released/ * General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.13 * The official Changelog for the 0.4.13 release: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.13 * The less technical Community Changelog for 0.4.13: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.13 * Application Tests for 0.4.13: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.13 * Download page: https://reactos.org/download/ releases/0.4.13 branch was forked from master on 2019-09-30 after 0.4.13-dev-1225-ge413df4

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ReactOS 0.4.12 released
by Colin Finck 23 Sep '19

23 Sep '19

The ReactOS team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.12. As always a multitude of improvements have been made to all parts of the OS, though userland components saw special emphasis this time around. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0412_1_2.p… Kernel improvements =================== Filesystem drivers require a great deal of support to function correctly, and there is arguably no truer test of ReactOS’ FS infrastructure than being able to run Microsoft’s own FS drivers. While the project is not quite there yet, driving towards this goal saw considerable improvements been made. Pierre Schweitzer and Thomas Faber paid particular attention to the common cache, a module with deep ties to the memory manager and which traditionally has been a very troublesome component. General stability saw marked improvement thanks to their contributions, along with that of Hermès Bélusca-Maïto in fixing up ReactOS’ own CDFS driver. More general progress can be found in Eric Kohl’s progression towards proper device power management, an especially tricky feature that many take for granted these days on Windows laptops. If only people knew just how many steps were involved in putting a device to sleep and then waking it up again in a working state. Then again, anyone who has ever had to hard reboot a machine that won’t wake from sleep can probably attest to the difficulty even the biggest OS vendors in the world still grapple with. Another feature that is certainly to be of greater interest to power users and IT specialists, Michael Fritscher has managed to fix support for PXE booting with ReactOS. In enterprise or industrial environments where central management of systems is a must, the more network functionality ReactOS provides, the more places it can find a use. Fixed Kernel-Image-Protection ============================= Security these days is a fundamental requirement of modern operating systems, and the ability for an OS to protect its own files is the foundations upon the rest of its security. To that end, most operating systems will have locks to prevent any random application from going and modifying images that are loaded and executed in the kernel space, such as the kernel itself (ntoskrnl), various feature subsystems (win32k), and of course general device drivers. ReactOS previously suffered from various bugs that prevented it from correctly doing this, but the write-protection functionality was rewritten during the run-up to 0.4.12, enabling its usage and also adding new features like execution protection just waiting for x64 to be fully enabled. Window snapping =============== A general usability shortcut, the ability to snap windows to be aligned to sides or maximized and minimized by dragging it in specific directions is something of a staple. Its lack in ReactOS meant power-users and their muscle memory were hard put out, but with 0.4.12 this is no longer the case. Denis Malikov has implemented the necessary support to make window snapping work, and the project invites one and all to try it out. And needless to say, the project did not forget the keyboard shortcuts that accompany the feature. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0412_2.png Font improvements ================= Font rendering is one of those background details that when things go right, one barely notices. When things go wrong however, the results can render entire suites of applications unusable. The work to make font rendering more robust and correct in ReactOS is, like many other features, a work in progress and joint effort between multiple developers, with longtime contributors James Tabor, Katayama Hirofumi MZ, and Mark Jansen playing especially active roles. Nonetheless, several significant pieces fell into place to allow 0.4.12 to enjoy some marked improvements over its predecessors. The single biggest fix that went into 0.4.12 would have to be a series of problems that badly garbled text rendering for buttons in a range of applications, from iTunes to various .NET applications as seen in the images below. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0412_3.png Intel e1000 NIC driver ====================== While ReactOS’ traditional usage in virtual machines generally shields it from rapid and oft massive changes in hardware configurations, even the systems emulated by virtual machines have undergone some evolution over the years. Case in point, VirtualBox and VMware have been shifting their default emulated network interface card to be based off of the Intel e1000 NIC in order to present their guests with a gigabit capable interface. Thanks to work done by Mark Jansen and Victor Perevertkin, ReactOS now possesses a driver that supports this NIC out of the box instead of requiring end-users to manually find and install a driver, a finicky process if one does not have a working network connection in the first place. Furthermore, the new driver should also be compatible with e1000 NICs in real hardware, though of course more real-world testing will be necessary to fully validate that assertion. Interested testers are of course encouraged to try and see just how much ReactOS can get out of the e1000. New themes ========== ReactOS first gained theming support in the 0.3.x era, with the Lautus theme being the standard bundled to demonstrate the feature. With 0.4.12, the team is pleased to announce two new themes to add to its stable. The first is Lunar, created by Joann Mõndresku and Adam Słaboń and designed to be reminiscent of the look and feel of XP while colored in the ReactOS style. The second is Mizu by Foxlet, which seeks to provide a flatter design that draws from the more modern design styles found in newer versions of Windows. A comparison of the two can be found below. Choice is always good, after all, and now users have more of them to find one that better suits their aesthetic tastes. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0412_4.png User-mode DLLs ============== A range of other improvements to user-mode components within ReactOS were made for 0.4.12, with some being more obvious than others. The most visible of course would be, more applications work, which is arguably the principal reason many users express interest in the project. Two outstanding improvements also help demonstrate the sort of contrast between the subtle and the dramatic in terms of ReactOS’ progress. The common controls library (comctl) is used by basically all Windows applications to draw various generic user interface elements. Fix relating to it read extremely dryly and would be a list of things that most end users would not understand. Still, the sort of plumbing it supports is essential to the rest of the user experience, and every time a user is able to smoothly slide through an application is a testament to the effort put into the library by developers like Giannis Adamopoulos, Doug Lyons, Stanislav Motylkov, and Denis Malikov. Speaking of Stanislav, another piece of work from him that made it into 0.4.12 represents the sort of dramatic, big step forward in that it enables an entire class of usage of the OS. MIDI devices have a long and storied history in the indie music scene and even today people are composing works that make use of their seemingly simplistic range. Due to that very history, MIDI devices and the software that supports them can be from what feels like a bygone era. ReactOS has always been about enabling people to keep using their existing hardware and software however, and Stanislav’s work now enables ReactOS to properly load the drivers for MIDI instruments and control them, thus opening up a whole new class of use for ReactOS. Oh and while he was at it, he also animated the rotation bar in the startup/shutdown dialog, just like in the NT5 family. It’s the little things that count. Misc improvements ================= As always, it would be physically impossible to do justice to all of the improvements and all the hard work done by the developers involved. From updates to the on-screen keyboard (Bisoc George), fixes to the calculator (Carlo Bramini), to quality of life improvements to the sound mixer dialog (Eric Kohl), one could go on and on and on. A summary can never do justice to everything that has been done, so we will have to content ourselves with the small window that it can provide. Testing ======= As always, ReactOS’ progress would be impossible without the dedication put in by the various testers and bug reporters like Joachim Henze that dedicate time and effort to this project, in both initially filing issues and following up to verify that fixes actually work. Third Party Syncs ================= The current third party sources that ReactOS syncs with have been brought to the following versions by their respective minders. * Wine-Staging 4.0 by Amine Khaldi * btrfs v1.1 by Pierre Schweitzer * uniata v0.47 by Thomas Faber * ACPICA v20190405 by Thomas Faber * libpng v1.6.35 by Thomas Faber * mbedtls v2.7.10 by Thomas Faber * mpg123 v1.25.10 by Thomas Faber * libxml2 v2.9.9 by Thomas Faber * libxslt v1.1.33 by Thomas Faber * libtiff v4.0.10 by Thomas Faber Statistics ========== JIRA issues fixed - 226 Number of commits - 1140 Oldest bug fixed for 0.4.12 - https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-187 Local Dll override support in ReactOS (Mark Jansen) releases/0.4.12 branch was forked from master on 2019-04-08 after 0.4.12-dev-1082-ge0e5363 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0412-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.12 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.12 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.12 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.12 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.11 released
by Colin Finck 04 Mar '19

04 Mar '19

The ReactOS team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.11. This version has seen substantial work done to the kernel, helping improve overall system stability. Kernel Improvements =================== While the term kernel is used as a sort of catch-all term, in truth the range of functionality that it encapsulates is quite wide. One case in point is the kernel’s responsibility for managing file I/O. A mistake here can cause subtle data corruption to more obvious hard crashes. Pierre Schweitzer’s fixes to the cache controller’s management of its data structures has removed at least one source of blue screens that occurred when attempting to backup a disk’s partition using the ODIN backup software. Storage improvements were something of a theme in kernel improvements this time around, as work was also done on the filesystems ReactOS supports. While the fastfat driver is an inhouse filesystem driver, ReactOS has always relied on a third party driver for BTRFS support. This reliance however feeds back, as problems ReactOS discover in our usage of the driver can be sent back upstream to help improve it further. Such was the case with a major memory leak problem that Thomas Faber was able to track down. And speaking of storage, the very interfaces that allows operating systems to talk with storage devices has undergone considerable change since the good old days of IDE and parallel connectors. These days most computers make use of SATA connections and the corresponding AHCI interface, support for which ReactOS relies upon the UniATA driver for. When the 6th generation of Intel’s Core processors (Skylake) was released, it was accompanied by a chipset platform whose AHCI SATA controllers proved incompatible with UniATA. This incompatibility has now been resolved by Alexander Telyatnikov, allowing users wishing to test ReactOS on more modern platforms to better make use of those platforms’ capabilities. Application Start/Stop ====================== When an application is run, it often depends upon other libraries in the form of DLLs. The loader (LDR) is responsible for finding and loading the respective dependent DLLs, and correctly iterating over these dependencies is fundamental to getting anything to run. One manner of specifying these dependencies is with the use of something called manifests, which was not properly supported in ReactOS. Considering that many modern applications make use of manifests, this was a very glaring hole. Mark Jansen’s work in the runup to 0.4.11 has however added sufficient support for manifests that the range of applications now able to start in ReactOS has significantly widened. Some examples of the newly enabled applications include Blender 2.57b, shown in the screenshot below, Bumptop, Evernote 5.8.3, Quicktime Player 7.7.9, and many others that users have the opportunity to discover for themselves. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0411_1.png Blender 2.57b running within ReactOS Stopping an application correctly is often just as important from a system stability perspective, as it is when a program is stopped that its previously allocated resources are freed up. For a long time ReactOS had particular difficulty when it came to dealing with the shutdown sequence for .NET 2.0 applications, often times not waiting long enough for these applications to properly exit. Work by Giannis Adamopoulos has however resolved this particular problem, adding further to ReactOS’ usefulness as a platform to run Windows compatible applications. USETUP Improvements =================== While the community wishlist for quality of life improvements in ReactOS is quite lengthy, one especially longstanding one has been the ability to upgrade an existing installation of ReactOS. Achieving this has required substantial effort in the USETUP module, effort that Hermès Bélusca-Maïto put considerable time into. The importance of this is twofold. The obvious enhancement is the ability to perform the upgrade, but the more substantive point is what this functionality entails for the future. For ReactOS to be usable as an actual system OS, it needs the ability to update in-place without losing user data and configuration. While requiring the user to go through the system installation process is still far from the user friendliness of other modern operating systems, it is still a substantial step forward and lays the foundation for ReactOS’ maturation into an everyday driver of people’s computers. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0411_2.png Screenshot of the ReactOS text mode setup with upgrade option Win32 ===== The Win32 subsystem responsible for graphical rendering in ReactOS is by itself a substantial beast. Improvements here often tend towards the most user visible of changes, since it is the engine through which the user will most interact with the operating system. Those familiar with the NT family’s basic design will recall that prior to the NT6 line that began with Windows Vista, there was a substantial block of functionality implemented inside the kernel space of the operating system. This block is commonly referred to as win32k, and because of its wide ranging kernel level privileges, problems within win32k can hard crash the entire system. Even something as seemingly basic as menus is reliant on functionality inside win32k, and fixing that related functionality was the focus of much effort by several developers. Basic robustness was the emphasis Thomas Faber focused on, running the menu code through a torture test that would see constant switching between different windows to make sure no resources or the like leaked across the different processes. One must recall that while in user mode applications are partitioned off, in kernel mode resources are effectively in a single space and the appropriate bookkeeping must be maintained to avoid crashes. Speaking of crashes, Mark Jansen also identified a problem with scrollbar initialization whose resolution has added yet another range of applications into ReactOS’ library of compatible programs. Case in point is the 32bit Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition version 1.3, as demonstrated in the screenshot below, and others like IceChat 7.63. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0411_3.png Screenshot of Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition 1.3 running on ReactOS The visual correctness of menu elements is also important, as misaligned elements can produce graphically jarring displays. As such while subtle, Katayama Hirofumi’s correction of the y-coordinate calculation for menu items adds a touch of detail that is the difference between a polished graphical experience and one that is just good enough. Menus can also extend to more than just the menu bar we often see at the top of applications. There are also pop-up menus like when one right-clicks on an item, as in the case of icons in the taskbar’s system tray. Mark was again responsible for this fix, which resolved the issue of incorrectly selected options when one tried to use the systray. Users can be thankful that one more source of frustration has now been squashed. Finally, one must recall that not the entire world uses the left-to-right display standard to English and other Latin based languages. Many, such as Hebrew and Arabic, use a right-to-left orientation. ReactOS’ support for this type of text rendering was first officially exposed in 0.4.10, but the effort remains a work in progress. That progress took a substantive leap with work done by Baruch Rutman to adapt the USP10 library and Bidirectional support code from Wine to ReactOS. More work of course remains to be done, but it is the nature of open source development to take an iterative approach, building improvements one upon another. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0411_4.png Bidirectional text support in ReactOS Networking ========== While end user improvements are often the most visible, quality of life improvements for power users, administrators, and developers have a certain multiplicative effect as well. To that end, the enablement of various network debugging and diagnosis programs by Pierre’s work in TCP and UDP connection enumeration is important in a more subtle way. While debugging network applications is a far from common use case for the average user, it is a crucial ability for people that work in IT or general software development. In this manner ReactOS is becoming useful as not just a platform for running applications, but also to debug them. And as history has shown, the ease of development and administration is a key feature in adoption by the wider tech industry. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0411_5.jpg Observing the network connections via the netstat tool while running mIRC Stability and Testing ===================== As ReactOS continues to grow in stability and maturity, the breadth and depth of testing necessary also increases, if only because there are more candidate applications to test. To this end Joachim Henze has with his usual dedication and perseverance worked to ensure the right balance was struck for this release in terms of stability and new/improved features. While it is always tempting to bring forward changes and fixes in the latest and greatest, one must recall that every such change brings with it a certain degree of risk. The ability to weigh that risk with the likely benefits is what makes quality assurance personnel like Joachim invaluable to any fast moving project. In light of ReactOS’ expansive improvements, and to help prospective users better understand the state of the OS and its supported applications, Joachim has also restructured the test results page to better encapsulate the relevant information. There one can now see not only the overall conclusion of the test, but also details such as track what drove a particular conclusion as well as any workarounds that they might themselves attempt. A marked step forward from the binary of works/fails, since a workaround suggests at least a starting point for a permanent solution to be found. Third Party Syncs ================= The current third party sources that ReactOS syncs with have been brought to the following versions by their respective minders. * ACPICA version 20181003, by Thomas Faber * PCI hardware ID database 2018-11-21, by Hermès Bélusca-Maïto * Wine Staging 3.17, by Amine Khaldi Statistics ========== JIRA Issues fixed (this includes both bugs and improvements) - 135 Number of commits - 984 The oldest bug fixed for 0.4.11 - https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-3579 0.4.11-release branch was forked from master on 2018-12-09 after 0.4.11-dev-948-gde7c959 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0411-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.11 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.11 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.11 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.11 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.10 released
by Colin Finck 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

The ReactOS project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.10, the latest of our quarterly cadence of releases. The project has seen an increasing emphasis on consistency and stability over the past few months, an emphasis the rapid release schedule helps reinforce to provide a better end-user experience. Even as new pieces of functionality are added, all this would be for naught if a user could not access them reliably. Booting from BTRFS ================== The headline feature for 0.4.10 would have to be ReactOS’ ability to now boot from a BTRFS formatted drive. The work enabling this was part of this year’s Google Summer of Code with student developer Victor Perevertkin. While the actual filesystem driver itself is from the WinBtrfs project by Mark Harmstone, much of Victor’s work was in filling out the bits and pieces of ReactOS that the driver expected to interact with. The filesystem stack in ReactOS is arguably one of the less mature components by simple dint of there being so few open source NT filesystem drivers to test against. Those that the project uses internally have all gone through enough iterations that gaps in ReactOS are worked around. WinBtrfs on the other hand came with no such baggage to its history and instead made full use of the documented NT filesystem driver API. Parallel to this effort was more basic work needed to expose the option to use BTRFS in the ReactOS installer and bootloader. It is all well and good for ReactOS to have a working driver, but the user ultimately needs to have a way to put it into use. The combined effort proved fruitful indeed, and users are invited to try out BTRFS support in 0.4.10. The newness of the feature will mean there will be the inevitable bug here and there, but it can only be with the community’s assistance in reporting them that the project can further improve. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_1.png Frontend Improvements ===================== When someone uses ReactOS, the interface through which they do so is the shell. And underpinning the shell’s functionality is the shell32 library, whose improvements are often directly exposed to the end user. For the past few months Katayama Hirofumi, a longtime contributor to the project, has fleshed out several new features while making improvements to other existing ones. For those of us whom do any significant amount of work on the command prompt, a wide range of tricks and shortcuts exist to make our lives easier. One such trick is being able to drag and drop a file or directory from the file explorer onto the command line in order to get its full path. And to complement this trick, Katayama-san has also made improvements to those of us that are steeped in the graphical shell more than the command prompt. In the past ReactOS offered only extremely limited means of interacting with things in the shell. Folders in explorer were rendered only a certain way, you could not change whether to use a single versus double click to enter them, and interacting with multiple windowed applications was clunky and more limited than one might expect. All this and more have been improved, and the following screenshot sums up that improvement far more succinctly than mere words can. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_2.png https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_3.gif The overall look and feel of ReactOS has also improved, or rather that of applications that run upon it. One special class of applications would be installers, of which the MSI family performs graphical rendering based on font heights. Users are likely to recall in the past a certain something just looking off when running MSI installers, just something slightly askew in how these installers appeared. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_4.png As seemingly small as these features may sound, many of them are expected by a user and their absence does not go unnoticed. Indeed the greatest success ReactOS could achieve is to have a user not even have to think when they navigate the system, everything working the way they expect. Katayama-san’s work takes us further down that path, the culmination of a multitude of small steps along the way. Finally, the project would be remiss to not mention the contributions of other developers to the shell’s continuing improvement. While Hermès Bélusca-Maïto’s important backend work remains somewhat inscrutable to end users, fixes by Denis Malikov and Jared Smudde to deal with file copying and shortcut creation will likely be more easily appreciated as another sign that ReactOS works, as expected. Stability ========= Stability is generally a hard thing to quantify, since it is often very subjective. Probably one thing that we can all agree on is that anything that prevents ReactOS, or applications running on it from crashing is a plus in the stability column. To that end while improvements to the memory management stack by Timo Kreuzer and Pierre Schweitzer might sound opaque and vague, they are nonetheless instrumental to ReactOS’ stability. Simultaneously, each time a major widely used application achieves full functionality on ReactOS, also constitutes a victory. A contribution by Stanislav Motylkov to the C Runtime library used in ReactOS now allows Git, the version control software used by this very project, to finally work correctly. A nice follow-up to the self-hosting achievement from last time around, we think many would agree. And of course no one is a fan of BSoDs, even if they evoke a slight sense of nostalgia. Fortunately for ReactOS’ sake, Mark Jansen was able to nail the cause of one such crash relating to the FreeType font library. Better that blue screens are consigned to our memories than be a perennial part of our daily computing experience. The surest metric of stability is however arguably how much of ReactOS and the desired collection of applications one wants to run actually work. For this, there as yet remains no substitute for human testing. To that end Joachim Henze has invested a tremendous amount of time, performing what amounts to continuous regression testing even before the formal process of preparing the release began. The fruit of his labors sits before you today, and while you may not see the countless number of fixes, reversions, and tweaks that were selectively filtered to produce version 0.4.10, rest assured that together they combine to provide a worthy testament to the effort that is the ReactOS Project. We hope you enjoy. Other Improvements ================== Stanislav Motylkov did some work on correctly retrieving BIOS information. Now the blank entries in dxdiag are filled with actual values. The community helped him to gather over 1000 unique BIOS dumps to help him test the implementation. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_5.png Third Party Attributions ======================== As always, it would be remiss for the project to not provide acknowledgement of the third party bits we make use of. For this release, Amine Khaldi has synchronized the user-mode DLLs to WINE-Staging version 3.9. Furthermore as mentioned above, ReactOS’ support for BTRFS owes a debt of gratitude to the WinBTRFS project, of which Pierre has synchronized to the latest version, 1.0.2. Statistics ========== JIRA Issues fixed (this includes both bugs and improvements) - 148 Number of commits - 660 The oldest bug fixed for 0.4.10 - https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-1246 0.4.10-release branch was forked from master on 2018-08-23 after 0.4.10-dev-630-gb8e98c4 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0410-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.10 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.10 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.10 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.10 - Community video showcasing some 0.4.10 features: https://youtu.be/4JxfyPoCl8I - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.9 released
by Colin Finck 23 Jul '18

23 Jul '18

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. Self-Hosting ============ The ability to build ReactOS on ReactOS, known as self-hosting, has often been touted as a sort of milestone in the OS’ maturity, but the details are far more nuanced. Compiling any large codebase, whether it be an operating system or even a web browser, stresses the system in a myriad of ways, with one of the biggest being memory usage and storage I/O. Code being compiled needs to be loaded from storage into memory, and more memory is required to hold all of the compiled objects as they are linked together. Scheduling is also to a certain extent stressed, as most modern build systems will attempt to spawn multiple compilation processes to speed up the build process. In the past, ReactOS was actually capable of self-hosting, but this capability came with significant caveats, with the biggest being this was achieved in a much older version of the ReactOS kernel. Since the reworking of the kernel into a more NT-compliant design and implementation, various gaps in functionality that remained to be completed rendered ReactOS unable to build itself again. After many years of hard effort, including the most recent batch of filesystem related changes done by Pierre Schweitzer, ReactOS is once more able to self-host. And in the spirit of open source, it was the FreeBSD project’s implementation of qsort that helped Pierre bridge some of the last pieces needed to achieve this. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image2.jpg Stability ========= A major source of system instability came from the complex interplay between the memory manager, the common cache, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and the FastFAT driver. The biggest culprit in the instability came from the significant resource leakages caused by the FastFAT driver, resulting in it eating up the common cache to the point where attempts to copy large files would result in a crash. To rectify this problem, Thomas Faber and Pierre worked together to correct the FastFAT driver’s behavior, adding in write throttling support and restraining its usage of the cache. While a more conservative usage of the cache might see the system behave a bit more slowly during IO operations, it ensures that resources remain available to service for large IO operations instead of crashing like before. Another notable improvement on FastFAT is the rewrite of the support for dirty volumes greatly reducing the chance of file corruptions. Whenever a dirty volume is been detected during boot “chkdsk” (Check Disk) will trigger a repair on those volumes. This often can protect the system from becoming unusable after a crash. The two images below are showing chkdsk in action: https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image4.png https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image1.png In addition to the work done during regular development, Joachim Henze made a significant effort during the release candidate testing to track down regressions and other bugs that have crept in since the last release. It cannot be overstated just how much work such manual testing takes, and Joachim should be applauded for his dedication and perseverance in ensuring 0.4.9 would be the best release to date. Shell Improvements & Features ============================= Several quality of life improvements have come to the shell, the first of which is a built in zipfldr (Zip Folder) extension by Mark Jansen. While Windows has long possessed this capability, now ReactOS can also uncompress zipped files without needing to install third-party tools to accomplish it. And as the gif below demonstrates, ReactOS’ implementation is indeed very zippy. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image3.gif And of course with such new extensions it would probably be useful to be able to manage them, something that Katayama Hirofumi MZ has been working on, along with plenty of other improvements to the shell. Another major piece of functionality that might appear simple but is actually quite complex is the ability to choose whether to move, copy, or link a file or folder when you drag it with the right mouse button. This piece was completed by Giannis Adamopoulos, whose prior work has been so integral in making the current ReactOS shell behave and function in ways users are long used to from Windows. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image5.gif Other Improvements ================== There are of course plenty of other changes in less trodden parts of ReactOS, with many people providing contributions and improvements. These range from the functional, like zooming no longer crashing in the Paint application thanks to Stanislav Motylkov, to more behind the scenes like Timo Kreuzer’s continued efforts to prepare the codebase to actually function when building a x64 target (the project owes Timo many bottles of beer for taking on that one). Other quality of life improvements include a new mouse properties dialog in the GUI component of the ReactOS installer by Eric Kohl, while Eric’s work involving starting and stopping of services, the device manager, and the sound mixer are more geared towards long term improvement and functionality. Hermès Bélusca-Maïto has continued his work in what might be termed the utilitarian applications of ReactOS, such as the clipboard viewer, the event viewer, the log-off dialog box, and the command prompt shell. And of course one can never forget RAPPS, the gateway program used for getting various applications installed on ReactOS. Considering ReactOS is intended to support many different languages, it is only appropriate that its unicode support be a priority, something that Alexander Shaposhnikov has lent his hand to. Compatibility in Windows is reliant on a ShimEngine that allows the loading of slightly different versions of libraries and APIs. ReactOS is much the same, and Mark has added the ability for ReactOS to present itself as Windows 8.1 with the Version APIs. As a sidenote, the engine itself proved useful in a rather unconventional manner when it was demonstrated to help reduce the loading time of the game Globulation 2. Of course ReactOS is not just about the features in the here and now, but also about preparations for the future. Thomas and Vadim Galyant have started merging in their improvements to the USB stack in preparation for native, official support for the oft requested booting from such devices. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer with every release. Since the transition to GitHub, the project has also received many pull requests from old and new contributors alike. The team offers its sincere thanks to everyone that has taken an interest in helping improve the project, and we look forward to meeting even more of you in the future. Syncing third parties ===================== ReactOS, being an open source project as well as its ecosystem, uses several bits of other open source projects. In 0.4.9 release Amine Khaldi has synced many user mode DLLs to WINE Staging version 3.3. Statistics ========== JIRA Issues fixed (this includes both bugs and improvements) - 137+ Number of commits - 922 The oldest bug fixed for 0.4.9 - https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-7744 Pull requests merged - 109 0.4.9-release branch was forked from master on 2018-05-20 after 0.4.9-dev-885-gddd03a8 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-049-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.9 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.9 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.9 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.9 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.8 Released
by Colin Finck 16 Apr '18

16 Apr '18

The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.8 as we continue to work on releasing every three months. As you may know, our previous 0.4.7 version was the first one developed in our Git/GitHub repository. 0.4.8 is the nice sequel and a good way to measure the GitHub impact on the ReactOS project. Since ReactOS reached GitHub, it has been forked 248 times. A nice amount understanding ReactOS is not a framework or a library, but a final product. These forks represent a nice amount of newcomers: translators, designers, coders and testers. Thanks to all of them, and the ReactOS regular devs, 209 new Pull Requests and 1094 commits have made it through to this 0.4.8 version. User Experience =============== ReactOS keeps pushing to bring the best possible user experience. Therefore the ReactOS User Interface in 0.4.8 has received extra care. Taskbar settings and dialogs have been rewritten by Giannis so now the auto-hide, toggle lock and always on top options work. These settings were visible before but as you might have noticed they've never been working at all. Meanwhile, David fixed several bugs and glitches of the notification area. Thanks to him, Giannis and Hermès, now balloon notifications are properly supported, queued and shown while a range of tooltip problems have been solved. Talking about the notification tray, due to Ged’s work, icons of killed and finished process are now automatically removed, even when apps crash. This is something that Windows doesn't even provide with Win10, and many Windows users may have noticed. Selecting multiple desktop icons was impossible prior 0.4.8. Enjoy it now thanks to Giannis’ work. His amazing work doesn't stop there, bugs related to property dialogs have been squashed, like the one preventing drive and folders capacity from being shown. Deletion and renaming of folders and files should work reliably after Pierre fixed a major leak. Additional new features included in this release should also boost the user experience, such as the shell autocompletion brought to you by Mark, a nice bonus on top of the improved relative path handling done by Stanislav. Also, now Network drives can be dismounted directly from explorer due to Pierre’s work, and Eject and Disconnect menu items are now implemented thanks to Katayama. From the visual point of view, several glitches related to the redrawing of static text elements, scrollbars, button captions, fonts and text background colors were fixed in this version. As a bonus, now ReactOS also detects more themes and is much faster when rendering big amounts of text. Regarding internationalization, now when changing the language in ReactOS, the font substitution settings are properly overwritten thanks to Katayama, and time is now correctly set due to Doug’s work. Combine all these features with the Kernel and Filesystem fixes that 0.4.8 is bringing and you'll understand why the ReactOS team is so excited regarding this new release. NT6+ Software support and Games =============================== With software specifically leaving NT5 behind, ReactOS is expanding its target to support NT6+ (Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10) software. Colin, Giannis and Mark are creating the needed logic in NTDLL and LDR for this purpose. Giannis has finished the side-by-side support and the implicit activation context, Colin has changed Kernel32 to accept software made for NT6+, and Mark keeps working on the shim compatibility layer. Although in a really greenish and experimental state, the new additions in 0.4.8 should start helping several software pieces created for Vista and upwards to start working in ReactOS. Microsoft coined the term backwards compatibility, ReactOS the forward compatibility one. A new tool, a DrWatson32 alike, has been created by Mark and added to 0.4.8, so now any application crashing will create a log file on the desktop. This crash dump details the list of modules and threads loaded, stack traces, hexdumps, and register state. Therefore, this new tool should help us understand what went wrong when the software crashed. Adding these reports, plus the debug logs, will provide ReactOS developers a good amount of information to understand what went wrong and how to create the needed fixes. In 0.4.7, several games were having trouble initializing properly when using native graphics drivers. Jérome has not just fixed this issue but also a palette regression in DirectX which was garbling colors when playing games. Kernel Stability and new features ================================= Kernel stability in this version comes from the Memory Manager, File system and Cache Manager fixes. The latest Coverity scan, which tracks old and detects new issues, shows a great evolution since 0.4.7. Several bugs have been squashed in the ReactOS CC and Freeloader, allowing it to boot in 96MB hardware (smaller RAM need than our 0.4.7 release). Talking about hardware, Pierre has fixed several bugs when writing the bootloader to disk and Serge has updated ACPI with extended features, that should bring some extra compatibility. In 0.4.7 the initial Cache Manager bugfixing was a great step forward in terms of stability. From 0.4.7 to 0.4.8, Cache Manager has gone under a massive review lead by Thomas and Pierre. This work revealed several bugs thanks to the tests specifically created to ensure this review doesn't introduce new regressions. Among others, a 17-year-old bug which was introducing corruption in the file system and which is now finally fixed. However, the Cache Manager work hasn't just been focused on bug-hunting, but also adding new and needed features. Now the ReactOS 0.4.8 Common Cache supports Lazy Writing and Read Ahead, which are major steps toward a performant operating system by reducing file access latencies. The other major component, the ReactOS Memory Manager, has also received many fixes thanks to Timo, some revealed by Coverity and others due his work on the x64 ReactOS port which enforces a pointer-size agnostic Memory Manager. Hardware support, NTFS and other drivers ======================================== One of the main objectives of each new ReactOS version is to improve the compatibility with hardware. In case you find any issues running ReactOS in your real hardware, please don't hesitate to file a bug report at the ReactOS bugtracker. Thanks to these logs, we've discovered that old hardware and some virtual machines were failing to boot when an empty floppy drive was detected. This bug has now been fixed and these hardware rigs are now enjoying ReactOS. Also these logs helped to detect several issues in PNP IRP handling which has been fixed by Thomas for this new version. Aside from fixing bugs in drivers, ReactOS includes some new ones in this version, such as a virtual floppy driver and a virtual CD-ROM driver. Also the CDFS driver has been replaced with the MSPL’ed original one after a full review. This review, as a curiosity, has revealed at least one bug, which has been sent upstream to Microsoft GitHub with its proper fix. The NTFS driver coded by Trevor, during GSOC 2016/2017, has been finally added. The NTFS driver has been an ongoing effort started by Hervé and Pierre, and which needed 2 different Google Summer Of Code to reach its current state. Under the mentoring of Pierre, Trevor Thomson has been coding and documenting his titanic NTFS coding efforts. If you're interested in file systems or how NTFS works and the tools needed to understand its behavior, you shouldn't miss the blog posts of Trevor. Thanks to these efforts ReactOS is able to read NTFS partitions in a more robust way, covering NTFS specific cases, and since 0.4.8, ReactOS introduces initial NTFS writing support. The NTFS writing feature is disabled but can be enabled through registry to test its experimental support. Third Parties ============= ReactOS, as part of the open source ecosystem, also uses bits of several projects. 0.4.8 has been synced with Wine 3.0, Freetype 2.9 and Ext2 0.69, among other projects. General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS 0.4.8 is also available. ISO images are ready on the ReactOS Download page. Some statistics =============== The oldest bug reported in Jira and fixed was CORE-5127 (advapi32: OpenTraceA (Sysinternals DiskMon2.01 dies with unhandled exception upon startup). Since 0.4.7, 340 bugs have been resolved: 211 marked as fixed, 37 as duplicates, 42 as won't fix, 21 as incomplete, 29 as cannot reproduce. 320 bugs fixed were directly related with the operating system, 10 from ReactOS online services, 5 from ReactOS test suite and 5 from ReactOS Build Environment. Pull Requests committed: 209 Forks: 248 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-048-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.8 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.8 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.8 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.8 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.7 Released
by Colin Finck 06 Dec '17

06 Dec '17

The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.7 as we continue to work on releasing every three months. We’re especially pleased to present this release as the very first one that’s been developed in our new Git/GitHub repository. Moving from Subversion to GitHub has proven to be an invaluable way to reach new testers, users and improve the overall awareness of the ReactOS project. To highlight the impact we’ve had since we moved to GitHub two months ago, ReactOS now leads the Win32Api and OsDev categories in Github, overtaking many amazing and well established projects. User Experience =============== 0.4.5 introduced visual styles support, 0.4.6 matured it, and now 0.4.7 has further improved support for styles created for Windows XP. If you haven’t already, just follow us on Twitter so you can see first hand the many skins being applied in ReactOS. Giannis Adamopoulos solved many issues in which ReactOS was managing transparency and messaging. His work on msstyles support paid off, as it’s reduced visual glitches in many applications. Support for Shell extension for files has been included by Giannis in this new version, and several other shell extension improvements have been worked on by Eric Kohl. The quick launch shell extension, developed by Shriraj Sawant under Google Summer of Code 2017, can also be enabled manually within this release for an early peek into this feature. James Tabor has put in a great deal of effort into getting the ReactOS painting process as close to Windows as possible. Furthermore, Katayama Hirofumi MZ has fixed the anti-aliasing text when a button was grayed out (and which was impossible to read before this fix). Another major achievement brought to you by Giannis has been to solve the Clipboard and Recycle Bin bugs. Now, in 0.4.7, ReactOS won’t crash due an invalid/empty clipboard as it did previously, copy/pasting multiple files and pasting folders in the background should work well and now follows the Windows specs more closely. In 0.4.7, ReactOS now correctly manages file deletions when dragging them to the Recycle Bin thanks to a patch from Serge Gautherie. Add to that numerous fixes regarding Drag and Drop and the whole user experience now feels much more polished for end users. Thanks to Kamil, several glitches that have been evident in the free/available pie chart for file systems are now gone, and he has fixed several other user experience issues such as Notepad showing multiple instances of find/replace windows, or stopping Bitvise SSH Server Control Panel from crashing due to a bug in NtGdiGetPixel(). Hardware support ================ ReactOS 0.4.7 allows you to reliably install the ISO from any drive without needing a CD, as a result of the work Colin Finck has done on the CDFS/ISO-9660 filesystem driver. We’re very thankful to our community about this point in particular, as the actual development work above happened at the ReactOS Hackfest, which was only possible thanks to your ongoing support and donations! Thomas Faber has addressed an issue in the HDAUDBUS driver that prevented VMware from loading ReactOS when a HD sound card is present. He has also addressed an issue in mbedtls (the SSL support library that we use in ReactOS) that could affect old hardware that doesn't support SSE2 instructions. Previous crashes on older hardware are now much less likely when interacting with SSL connections. In addition to the above, ReactOS 0.4.7 is now properly checking the end-of-memory-map entries and aligning physical addresses thanks to some work done by Serge. That contributed further to better hardware compatibility. If you have encountered problems when trying to run previous version of ReactOS on your PC, please consider retrying with 0.4.7 and sending us bug reports so we can work on them. New ReactOS Application Manager =============================== As part of the Google Summer of Code program, the ReactOS Application Manager was improved in many areas by Alexander Shaposhnikov, including many new features and fixes. Now you can install multiples pieces of software from Rapps in bulk and downloads are now done in the background ensuring you can continue to use the app whilst installing. Install percentages are now shown, force update finally works, the Installed category is now back, and the details sections show enhanced information and various other fixes and features. More info about this new version in Rapps blog posts. Applications/Games Compatibility ================================ For those who enjoy retro-gaming, Aleksandar Andrejević has fixed linear 4-bpp mode, meaning even more old and addictive games are now playable in ReactOS, and your productivity has another a good reason to fall… Mark Jansen has fixed a critical issue regarding services. ReactOS 0.4.7 now supports creating an interactive service under the LocalSystem account. Now, among other software, VMWare Horizon setup works in ReactOS. Mark is also working on Application Compatibility support (shims) which is still an ongoing project. Thanks to Eric, the User/group/share management modules (netapi.dll, netapi32.dll and samsrv) have been greatly developed in the 0.4.7 release, getting them even further in terms of compatibility. Kernel and Filesystems ====================== ReactOS is now able to handle Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, ReiserFS, FFS and NFS partitions. We’re proud to say that ReactOS natively supports more File Systems than all Windows versions combined! Continuing on filesystems, Pierre Schweitzer has implemented the fsutil tool, which arrived in Windows 2003, and is now available through ReactOS as open source. Furthermore, the ReactOS fsutil tool also supports FAT file systems whereas its Windows counterpart does not, so this is another instance of ReactOS improving something over what Microsoft originally offers. Pierre’s work on FastFat, fixing reference counting overflows and file attributes settings, correcting the opening counts, implementing statistics counting and squeezing bugs in the Common Cache, is all part of this enhanced stability in 0.4.7. It got also improved thanks to the upgrades of the various file systems drivers supported by ReactOS (Ext2 and BtrFS) and the fixes they required to avoid regressions. New apis have been implemented in Kernel32.dll, which has seen several rewrites in order to fix bugs detected by our test suite, but also to bring in support for Windows 2003 features such as reparse points and mount manager backed volumes. Timo Kreuzer has also fixed some Memory Manager bugs with the goal of more stability. If 0.4.6 surprised you with its stability thanks to the work being done in this area, then you will find 0.4.7 to be another step further in that regard. Eric Kohl has added initial STORPORT/STORAHCI implementations that can be enabled manually for now via registry as an alternative to the default UniATA driver, in an effort to get closer to native behavior and maximize compatibility. Third Party Modules =================== ReactOS depends on 3rd party open source projects so in 0.4.7 we’ve updated them to their latest version. Libpng, mpg123, mbedtls, btrfs,along with the many modules that Wine shares with us, which are individually synched by Amine Khaldi, that ReactOS can use in the user mode. We express our gratitude to every single open source project we use, and send regards to all teams behind them. We also keep contributing back to them, in the spirit of open source, whenever we can. For instance, David contributed a 64bit related fix to the MKISOFS project, and several ReactOS developers contribute patches back to the Wine project and also Wine Staging, in addition to performing patch reviews in the appropriate mailing list. Quality Assurance ================= ReactOS believes heavily in QA so many new tests have been integrated and implemented covering critical areas as Memory Manager (IO MDL, MmBuildMdlForNonPagedPool, etc..) or Common Cache. The ReactOS testing infrastructure now supports testing File System mini-filters which is an important step forward to ensure future development in the upcoming filter manager. This new version of ReactOS has gone through several Coverity scans to detect and fix critical bugs detected. In addition to automated tests, ReactOS enjoyed impressive testing coverage thanks to the manual tests for the Release Candidates by Joachim Henze. General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS 0.4.7 is also available. ISO images are ready in the ReactOS Download page. Some statistics =============== The oldest bug fixed was CORE-2366. "Rapps: modify link does not work". Reported 10 years ago. During these 3 months, 453 bugs have been resolved: 263 marked as fixed, 46 as duplicates, 56 as won't fix, 41 as incomplete, 47 as can not reproduce. 246 bugs fixed were directly related with the operating system, 12 from ReactOS online services, 1 from ReactOS test suite, 3 from ReactOS Building Environment and 1 from ReactOS RosApps. - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-047-released - Press Kit: https://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/files/ReactOS/0.4.7/ReactOS-0.4.7-… - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.7 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.7 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.7 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.7 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.6 Released
by Colin Finck 02 Sep '17

02 Sep '17

The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.4.6 as a continuation of its three month cadence. 0.4.6 is a major step towards real hardware support. Several dual boot issues have been fixed and now partitions are managed in a safer way avoiding corruption of the partition list structures. ReactOS Loader can now load custom kernels and HALs. Printing Subsystem is still greenish in 0.4.6, however Colin Finck has implemented a huge number of new APIs and fixed some of the bugs reported and detected by the ReactOS automated tests. Regarding drivers, Pierre Schweitzer has added an NFS driver and started implementing RDBSS and RXCE, needed to enable SMB support in the future, Sylvain Petreolle has imported a Digital TV tuning device driver and the UDFS driver has been re-enabled in 0.4.6 after fixing several deadlocks and issues which was making it previously unusable. Critical bugs and leakages in CDFS, SCSI and HDAUDBUS have been also fixed. From the Compatibility point of view, 0.4.6 introduces, thanks to Mark Jansen, a shim engine as part of the new application compatibility framework. This shim engine is disabled by default in 0.4.6 but can be enabled through the ReactOS registry. This release also includes a special NTDLL library that exports some of the NTDLL Vista+ functions needed by newer software pieces. 0.4.5 introduced msstyle themes in ReactOS, allowing you to switch to something different, more modern or nostalgic if you don't like the Classical skin. In 0.4.6, and thanks again to your donations, Giannis has fixed lots of bugs in Shell32, Comctrl32 and Browseui, so now msstyle themes are fully working. In 0.4.6 efforts were made to improve the user experience. "Lock Taskbar", "Hide inactive icons", and "Group similar taskbar buttons" settings are properly remembered now each time you reboot ReactOS. Explorer’s taskbar is finally resizable. Tiled, centered and stretched wallpapers are correctly placed now. Explorer’s addressbar is much improved, and now works nicely with symlinks. The clipboard has gone through a massive fixup, making it more usable and reliable. 0.4.6 is much more stable now as a result of several memory manager, ntoskrnl and filesystem fixes. To name a few, mapping a view of the physical memory sections works now, several MM and NTOS leakages were plumbed, and NTOS:IO critical bugs were fixed. Several buffer overflows and overruns, logic issues and dead code detected by Coverity and other tools have been fixed, leading to less corruptions and leaks. In order to track ReactOS compatibility with Windows behavior, 1,088,893 unit test cases have been added since 0.4.5. This new release has been tested through 14,238,159 unit test cases, failing just 18,419 (a 0,129% ratio failure). Still, ReactOS is marked as Alpha for the moment. Eric Kohl has implemented NETAPI, the network transport and security library. Peter Hater has reworked WinSock2. Several bugs affecting rendering performance, NtGDI, brushes, and shape creation are now fixed thanks to James Tabor, Mark Jansen, and Thomas Faber. Amine Khaldi has synced Wine, and tons of other third party modules needed for 0.4.6. Font substitution and font breaking issues have been fixed by Katayama Hirofumi MZ and Giannis. ReactOS now supports the Esperanto language thanks to Mike Swanson and lot of contributors have contributed with translations and patches. - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-046-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.6 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.6 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.6 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.6 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.4.5 Released
by Colin Finck 18 May '17

18 May '17

The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.4.5 as a continuation of its three month cadence. Beyond the usual range of bug fixes and syncs with external dependencies, a fair amount of effort has gone into the graphical subsystem. Thanks to the work of Katayama Hirofumi and Mark Jansen, ReactOS now better serves requests for fonts and font metrics, leading to an improved rendering of applications and a more pleasant user experience. Your continued donations have also funded a contract for Giannis Adamopoulos to fix every last quirk in our theming components. The merits of this work can be seen in ReactOS 0.4.5, which comes with a smoother themed user interface and the future promises to bring even more improvements. In another funded effort, Hermès Bélusca-Maïto has got MS Office 2010 to run under ReactOS, another application from the list of most voted apps. Don’t forget to install our custom Samba package from the Application Manager if you want to try it out for yourself. On top of this, there have been several major fixes in the kernel and drivers that should lead to stability improvements on real hardware and on long-running machines. - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-045-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.5 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.5 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.5 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.5 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download

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ReactOS 0.3.17 Released
by Aleksey Bragin 07 Nov '14

07 Nov '14

The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.3.17. A major new feature for this release is the inclusion of NTVDM, which provides support for a wide range of 16bit applications, a long requested feature by the community. NTVDM is still undergoing work but we felt that it was ready enough to provide a sneak peak to the wider community. In addition, the leadup to the 0.3.17 release saw a very impressive round of testing by the community. Several regressions and bugs discovered in the release candidates were promptly fixed and incorporated into the final release. ReactOS is quickly approaching a stage where what the releases will offer is polish compared to previous releases. That will be an important milestone, as it is then that we can begin recommending to people that they try using ReactOS for day-to-day computing. We hope you look forward to it as much as we do. The detailed 0.3.17 changelog is also available: http://www.reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.3.17 Main news link: http://reactos.org/node/911 Download link: https://www.reactos.org/download

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