As some of you know the ReactOS Project recently launched an Indiegogo campaign (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reactos-community-edition) to fund development of a Community Edition where backers get a say in priority for software and hardware support. The project has been going strong but we're still a long way from the finish goal.
Backers can choose from a range of rewards from votes for their desired hardware or software to collectables like USB sticks, shirts, and the elusive Hackbunny of yore to even getting your name embedded into the Community Edition. Who knows, depending on how well we do, there might even be cake. So come on by and show your support. Together we can make the dream that is ReactOS a reality.
The ReactOS project recently initiated a Kickstarter campaignin the form of Thorium Core, a cloud desktop environment that allows one to have a consistent computing environment with the same applications and settings anywhere one has a reliable broadband connection. To achieve this, Thorium intends to complete the work needed to bring ReactOS to a state where it is useable for day to day activities as well as tune it for usage in various virtual environments. Due to ReactOS' lightweight nature, a Thorium Core instance will have more resources to dedicate to the things that matter most to a user, running their applications.
Of course, Thorium isn't about just a cloud desktop. It's very much about ReactOS itself. The project has gotten close, very close, to being ready for general use. Rough edges are being polished at a daily rate and in the preparation for 0.4.0, the team has put significant effort into not just the system's stability but also the user friendliness of a new explorer shell. With Thorium's success, the project can work on other issues that stand in the way of ReactOS being ready for day to day use. So for ReactOS supporters, Thorium offers the chance to bring ReactOS out of alpha, into beta, and maybe even into production. If you've been waiting years for ReactOS to be to the point where you can replace your soon to be retired Windows XP install, then here's a chance to help the project make that final push to be ready.
The ReactOS project is proud to announce the release of version 0.3.15. A culmination of over a year of development, 0.3.15 incorporates several architectural enhancements to create a more compatible and conformant implementation of the NT architecture. Perhaps the most user visible enhancement is initial support for USB devices, both storage and input.
Infrastructure wise, this is the first release of ReactOS using CMake instead of rbuild. The conversion to CMake has allowed developers to generate Visual Studio solutions for working on the code, though several C++ components still need work before support for Microsoft's toolchain is complete.
The importance of 0.3.15 is not just its release but what it promises. Feedback from testers helping with finalizing the release provided a host of data that developers used to fix a wide range of issues. It is often said that each release should be better than its predecessors. 0.3.15 certainly fulfills that criteria but also promises much better for the future.
Some highlights of this release are as follows
* Preliminary support for USB mice, keyboard, and storage devices.
* A rewritten session management subsystem
* ARM3 has taken over all memory management responsibilities except for sections.
* AHCI support with updated UniATA driver
* Preliminary support for debugging ReactOS components using windbg
* Improvements based off results from the AutoHotKey application functionality test suite
* Bugfixes based off running Driver Verifier on several bundled drivers
In addition to the packages traditionally provided by the release, there is an additional image of a hybrid CD used at the LinuxTag expo to showcase ReactOS. This image incorporates some additional USB related fixes to allow for more robust initialization and detection of devices along with enabling of the Lautus theme by default. Please note that theme support is still incomplete and the use of Lautus in the LinuxTag hybrid CD was primarily for showcase purposes and is not yet ready for general use.
The detailed 0.3.15 changelog is also available: http://www.reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.3.15
Main news link: http://reactos.org/node/663
Download link: https://www.reactos.org/download
Normally this list is used to announce new releases of ReactOS operating
system, however this time is an exception. There is a significant, rare
event which I would like to get your attention to.
ReactOS Fundraiser 2012.
The ReactOS Project has engaged in several fundraising efforts in the
past, and thanks to their success and non-monetary donations, an
industry-grade infrastructure
<http://www.reactos.org/en/Infrastructure.html> was developed and
deployed, and is being continuously improved.
Donations have also helped developers travel to several conferences and
events to promote and present ReactOS. These presentations were crucial
in drawing attention to the project and often helped spur further donations.
This year we want to do something different, something even grander.
ReactOS is quite close to transitioning to beta testing and we are
constantly improving the development process itself. However for many
core developers ReactOS remains a hobby in which they participate in
their spare time as all have other real life obligations to meet. All of
the developers are extremely skilled and every contribution they make
helps significantly improve ReactOS' quality.
For the first time ever, the ReactOS Foundation seeks to go beyond the
usual small fundraising campaigns aimed at paying infrastructure
expenses. We wish to raise money
<http://www.reactos.org/en/foundation_donate.html> *to formally hire as
many core developers as possible*, to work on the project they believe
in, the project they've been working on, to transform a hobby into a job
so they can dedicate all of their time to the ReactOS project.
In light of the significant advances the project enjoyed thanks to work
done as part of Google's Summer of Code 2011, it became even more
obvious that the fastest way to accelerate the development of ReactOS is
by directly funding developers to contribute to ReactOS. As such, the
project is reaching out to our many fans and believers to help make this
happen.
Together, we can make ReactOS into a true competitor and alternative for
computer users worldwide.
Thanks,
Aleksey Bragin
ReactOS Project Coordinator
Links:
Official news text: http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_75.html (other
languages may be available)
ReactOS Fundraising Campaign 2012 Progress bar (updated daily):
http://www.reactos.org on top of the page.
Donation page: http://www.reactos.org/en/foundation_donate.html (other
languages may have country-specific ways of donation)
The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.14.
This version includes a significant amount of changes including both
user visible and architectural improvements. Also included in this
release is the valuable work accomplished as part of the Google Summer
of Code 2011 event, of which ReactOS was a mentoring project.
One of the more significant sets of improvements was to ReactOS’
networking stack. As part of the GSoC, ReactOS gained a new TCP/IP
driver built around the LwIP project. The LwIP library is a popular and
stable implementation of TCP/IP originally intended for embedded use.
The new driver has significantly increased both stability and
performance, allowing the use of high bandwidth applications such as
torrents. Furthermore, ReactOS has improved compatibility with NT5.1
drivers with the export of scatter/gather DMA functionality. Last but
not least, ReactOS now includes wireless network support and is able to
connect to both open and WEP encrypted networks.
One of the more obvious user visible changes includes the implementation
of theme support. Users can now change the look and feel of ReactOS’
user interface by installing XP based themes and changing the appearance
of the desktop from the default classic look to something more exciting.
Architecturally, the addition of a kernel mode testing framework has
helped to identify a variety of bugs in kernel mode components. This is
an important change with regards to core stability and is proving
invaluable in ensuring the project does not suffer unexpected
regressions in the kernel.
Support for building ReactOS using the Microsoft toolset has also played
a large part in the release. This is now at a stage where ReactOS can be
entirely built using an MSVC based environment and can produce a working
boot and livecd. Along with GCC, ReactOS can now be built using two
different toolsets and on a variety of platforms including Windows,
Linux and Mac OS X.
During the preparation of this release 789 bugs were fixed, including
118 regressions with the oldest regression being issue #1009 (can't open
context menu with Shift-F10). The oldest bug fixed was #209 (PrintScreen
doesn't work) from over eight years ago. 811 new bugs were opened since
the release of 0.3.13.
A list of some of the more significant changes includes:
* ACPI
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface support is now enabled
automatically when the ACPI Hardware Abstraction Layer is used,
providing support for power buttons and full system power off.
* LwIP
A new TCP/IP driver using the LwIP driver has been integrated into
ReactOS, significantly improving network performance and stability and
also presenting an upgrade path to IPv6.
* MSVC Compatibility
ReactOS can now be built using Microsoft's compiler to create a working
boot or livecd.
* Scatter/Gather Support
Scatter/Gather DMA operations are now supported, significantly improving
compatibility with network drivers written for NT5.1 and later.
* Shell Improvements
The shell32 library rewrite in C++ has been merged in and brings with it
various architectural improvements that will help serve as a foundation
for future work on the new explorer shell.
* Special Pool
A special pool designed to guard against misuses of kernel pool memory
has been implemented.
* Theme Support
ReactOS now has the infrastructure needed to theme the user interface
and shell, allowing users to install and use something besides the
classic Windows theme.
* WiFi Support
ReactOS now supports wireless network drivers and is able to join open
and WEP encrypted wireless networks.
The detailed 0.3.14 changelog is available here:
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/ChangeLog-0.3.14
Main news link: http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_70.html
Download link: http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html
I would like to thank all the past and present members of the ReactOS
team for their hard work and of course all those in the community that
support us.
We will never forget involvement and contribution of those who left our
world too early.
http://www.reactos.org/pipermail/ros-dev/2011-June/014419.html
--
Aleksey Bragin
ReactOS Foundation President
http://www.reactos.org
The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.13.
This version continues building on the work first previewed in
0.3.12, ranging from memory management improvements to better sound
and display control. A Coverity scan also occurred between 0.3.12 and
0.3.13, helping the team clean up potential security holes and also
help improve general stability by enforcing more care in memory
operations.
Some of the biggest system changes happened with memory management
with the introduction of a new heap manager based on the Windows 2003/
Vista architecture, significantly increasing ReactOS’ compatibility
with advanced memory allocation types and providing proper kernel
mode heap management used by win32k. Performance should also see a
significant boost for many memory operations even without the
addition of optimizations on top of the new heap. The addition of a
debug heap manager late in the release cycle also spurred on a series
of fixes to memory usage across ReactOS, from the operating system to
bundled applications. These changes should significantly improve
system stability, moving ReactOS one step closer to being a viable
daily use operating system.
Other improvements include the merging in of work done in the
yarotows branch for improved display driver loading and dynamic mode
changing, significantly increasing ReactOS’ usability.
During the preparation of this release, 282 bugs were fixed,
including 50 regressions with the oldest regression being issue #4811
("comctl32.dll sync broke Abiword toolbar"). The oldest bug fixed is
#1567 "Taskmanager still showing processes while they are
closed" (almost 5 years old). 382 new bugs were opened since the
release of 0.3.12.
Previous releases 0.3.11 and 0.3.12 were downloaded 238 and 526
thousand times, which totals up to an amazing amount of 764 000
downloads, and a significant increase looks very promising.
Some of the most important changes:
Implemented dynamic video mode switch and improved graphics drivers
compatibillity.
Fixed several graphic issues.
Completely rewritten heap manager with additional debugging
capabilities for detecting out of bounds operations.
Improved management of audio mixer lines, preventing application
sounds from becoming garbled due to overlapping lines.
Heavy bug fixing in user subsystem ( improved handling of user mouse
input, messages and timers).
Visual artifacts fixed in some apps as Firefox and Thunderbird.
Fixed several bugs in the installer.
Improved apps compatibility: Stellarium 0.10.2, LHelp,
winpcap,FlashPlayer 10.1 and Mono 2.8, OllyDbg 1.10, Xenon 2000, VLC
1.1.5, Foobar 2000, Skype 4.0.0 work now.
More SATA devices are supported.
Lots of test cases were fixed.
Many improvements in the memory manager that fix several bugs and
make it more compatible with NT memory manager.
The detailed 0.3.13 changelog is also available.
Main news link: http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_65.html
Download link: http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html
--
Aleksey Bragin
ReactOS Foundation President
http://www.reactos.org
The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.12.
This is a huge release for the team, not just with regards to the
number of improvements which this release holds but in terms of the
leap forward architecturally, stability wise and in bringing some of
the more modern aspects of the NT kernel into ReactOS.
It's been almost a year since the last release and whilst this is
understandably excessive, it was required to stabilize the OS due to
the nature of the work which was undertaken. Focus at the start of
this release was on a single area, the trap handler mechanism, which
resulted in a complete rewrite of this area. This brought with it the
need for more changes which escalated into many areas getting an
overhaul and many new technologies being developed and brought into
the core. What resulted from this was a vastly more modern kernel
containing code which had been exercised significantly less than the
code it replaced. This triggered a large testing phase to bring the
stability and compatibility to levels above that of the previous code.
During the preparation of this release, 259 bugs were fixed,
including 61 regressions some of which originated from ReactOS 0.3.7.
Ten of those bugs are more than 3 years old, with the oldest fixed
bug being #969 (5 years old).
A heavily cut down list of some of the more major changes which have
been going on in the past year is as follows:
• Memory Manager - The memory manager continued to see much work as
the ARM team replaced each component piece by piece whilst also
maintaining the functionality of the old manager. Although 0.3.12
does not completely switch over to the new manager, what is obvious
are the speed, stability and compatibility improvements of this new
model.
• NMI support - ReactOS can now handle NMIs with a Red Screen of
Death, useful for capturing hardware errors detected by the CPU or
Bus. Additionally, support for 3rd party NMI callbacks has been
implemented, which is useful for certain server systems. Finally,
support for generating a crash dump during an NMI is partly
implemented, which can help when a machine is frozen or hung and an
external NMI dump switch is used.
• Trap Handler Rewrite - Almost all CPU faults, trap, exception, and
system call code is now written in C instead of Assembly. Many legacy
and/or deprecated code paths have been disabled and performance-heavy
debugging paths disabled by default. Additionally, the x64 and ARM
ports now share much more of this code. Finally, the code is much
cleaner and can take advantage of compiler optimizations to generate
the best possible code for the CPU instead of writing hand-crafted
assembly that was specific only to certain CPU models. Work is
ongoing to remove even more of the last remaining Assembly routines.
• EMS - Support for Emergency Management System (or Headless) has
been partially implemented. The boot flags documented by Microsoft
are supported, and certain debug output is sent to the serial port as
expected. Work is ongoing to provide the EMS logging capabilities and
to move the existing legacy KDBG debugger over EMS. SAC (Special
Administration Console) driver work is also in progress to compliment
this.
• PnP Compatibility - Various improvements have been done to increase
hardware support and support for loading 3rd party drivers.
• ACPI Improvements - The ARM team has implemented the basic drivers
required for supporting batteries and 3rd party UPS/battery drivers,
including support for the ACPI Composite Battery specification. This
support is not currently enabled in this release because ACPI is
still undergoing work.
• New PCI-X driver - The ARM team has been slowly working on the new
PCI bus driver. Previously, ReactOS was using a very simple and
mostly stubbed PCI bus driver which lacked support for many real-
world PCI bus features, PCI-to-PCI bridges etc. With this new
driver, compatibility on real hardware, not just virtual machines,
should improve significantly, along with performance.
• SxS support – Side-by-side code was added, along with loading and
finding manifest files. It’s an important step forward to be
compatible with modern applications which use this technology.
• Pool Corruption Fixes - Perhaps the most serious of these suspected
leaks were fixed thanks to combined efforts of key ReactOS developers
utilising advanced methods including a customized version of QEMU
virtual machine.
• Timer and message handling rewrite - Incorrect handling of non-
queued messages led to deadlocks in some applications which the
message handling rewrite resolved. The timer implementation rewrite
is also completed by this release which fixes many timer-related
problems, most known is the “need to move mouse in order to download
in FireFox”.
• x64 build - While the x64 port is still in an early stage regarding
the functioning of the kernel, most of the generic compilation issues
are resolved and necessary core functionality implemented. These
efforts have been merged back into trunk, so that trunk can be
compiled for x64 target. With the help of automatic builds, possible
breakages can now quickly be detected and resolved. Don't expect it
to boot to GUI though!
The changelog <http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/
ChangeLog-0.3.12> for 0.3.12 is also markedly different from previous
releases, with an emphasis on conveying an understandable and concise
summary of major changes in the release. Thus instead of duplicating
that summary here, we invite you to peruse its contents and see what
has been accomplished.
Whilst the ReactOS team has still been attending many public events
and conferences in various different countries, we’ve been out of the
news due to what may appear as a quiet patch or a lull in activity.
We hope this release will go some way to show that we’ve been busier
than ever behind the scenes.
The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.11. This
release has been delayed by quite some time due to various blocker bugs
which manifested each time we tried to release. A lot of time has gone into
hunting down these bugs and various steps have been taken to try to ensure
we don't hit this problem again. This isn't to say we don't have a lot of
new and exciting features in this release. Two of which stand out are the
huge changes to the Memory Manager and another leap forward for the sound
stack
It's difficult to sum up all of the changes which have taken place in the
memory manager short of saying it's been almost a total rewrite. These
changes have not only brought a much more stable and reliable component, but
also now includes support for ARM processors. ARM memory management units
(MMU's) are handled in an entirely different manner than that of x86 and
x86-64 MMU's, however the ARM Mm component has been written alongside the
x86 component with various areas sharing code when possible. Further to
this, these changes bring much improved compatibility with WinDbg. WinDbg
support is now at a level where the majority of everyday features are
working and tasks which previously seemed so distant using WinDbg, such as
stepping through the kernel, listing process threads or dynamically editing
memory are now working. We're now at a level where having PDB's (Microsoft's
debugging symbols) would make debugging the reactos kernel a similar
experience to debugging the Windows kernel, with the added advantage of
source mode.
For the technically inquisitive, here
<http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/ChangeLog-0.3.11#MM> are the Mm
changes in this release
The sound stack continues to see extensive work throughout all areas. This
release brings with it support for wave recording and mixer support such as
volume level adjustment and muting. Improved core component compatibility
with WinXP means that more components now run within Windows and goes some
way to showing the level of compatibility the sound stack is now achieving.
Compatibility and stability changes have been continuing throughout the
entire operating system with a great deal of fixes coming from the Wine test
framework used to ensure application interface compatibility.
As this is the 0.3.11 release, we felt a certain degree of nostalgia towards
'Windows 3.11 for workgroups' and added a fun easter egg in tribute. See if
you can spot it, the older generation will surely have no problems
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.
Changes summary
A detailed consolidation of all changes can be found in the changelog
<http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/ChangeLog-0.3.11> . A sum up of some
of the more important changes is as follows:
* A rewrite of the kdcom kernelmode library which is now much more
compatible with the Microsoft version. This allows for improved built-in
support for WinDbg
* Support for delay loaded dlls has been added in our build tools,
providing delay loading functionality for our shipped libraries
* Support for Chinese and Korean fonts has now been added
* A new handler has been written for setting and getting system wide
parameters (see SystemParametersInfo API), now making it much more complete
and compatible with the Windows implementation
* A selection of application compatibility improvements can now been
seen, including Opera, Open Office, Firefox 3.5, VLC1.1 and skype
* For fun, a new Spider Solitaire application has been added
* Synchronization of most of the Wine usermode DLLs and some Win32
subsystem code shared with Wine
VirtualBox install note
A bug has surfaced meaning that installing ReactOS in VirtualBox will result
in a hang when loading the USB driver, unless the VM has 256Mb RAM or more.
To counteract this, either raise the RAM from the default 192Mb or disable
the USB device. We have created a preloaded VirtualBox VM for download
incorporating this workaround. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.10.
This version is the first to use the Universal ATA driver as the
default disk driver, adding support for Serial ATA and partitions
greater than 8GB. In addition, recent work was done on the USB stack
to increase compatibility with USB keyboards and mice. These features
are still under heavy development and have several known bugs, but
their inclusion should allow more people to run ReactOS on real
hardware and are part of the extensive work to make ReactOS usable as
an every day operating system.
Apart from that, ReactOS made it into the final round of the
SourceForge Community Choice Awards. If you like it, you can vote for
us ( https://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/vote/?f=431 ) in the
categories Best Project, Best Project for Government and Most Likely
to Change the Way you Do Everything
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-0.3.10 ). A sum up
of some of the more important changes is as follows:
* Fixed inability to work with partitions bigger than 8Gb
* Added possibility of installing into any of four primary
partitions
* Initial support for SerialATA controllers along with enhanced
ATA support
* Initial USB keyboards and mice support
* Greatly improved network cards support (20 different NICs were
tested successfully)
* Increased stability in networking
* A clone of MS paint application has been introduced
* Initial support for MSVC compilation
* Better cleanup of system resource usage
* Synchronization of most of the Wine usermode DLLs and some
Win32 subsystem code shared with Wine
Main news link: http://www.reactos.org/en/news_page_53.html
Download link: http://www.reactos.org/en/download.html
--
Aleksey Bragin
ReactOS Foundation President
http://www.reactos.org
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
