[ros-announce] ReactOS 0.3.9 Released

[Aleksey Bragin]

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