Hi,
I have two concerns with the current positions in ReactOS:
1. what is the situation with Release Engineers currently? For the
last few releases, Colin was de-facto the only one doing all release-
related work. Wiki page states Z98 as a release engineer. Z98 - are
you still available for this position, or should we try to get
someone else to help Colin?
2. Klemens Friedl unfortunately has not been available for quite a
long time, really long time. He informed me about it, so it's fine,
and sometime in future he is going to get back to ReactOS hopefully.
But, as of now, I think he can't hold the Web Coordinator position.
Should we move this to someone else who is active now, like Colin or
Danny if they have time?
Opinions are appreciated.
WBR,
Aleksey Bragin.
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.
During the previous edition of the Free and Open Source Software
Developer's European Meeting (FOSDEM) <http://fosdem.org/>, several
alternative FOSS Operating System projects
(Haiku <http://haiku-os.org/>, ReactOS <http://www.reactos.org/>)
shared booths, but there were discussions about going beyond presenting
each projects on its own, and instead seek cooperation. Recently, at
the Google Summer of Code mentor summit, other OS projects gathered and
formed the Rosetta OS group <http://code.google.com/p/rosetta-os/> to
work on driver sharing.
This year, the FOSDEM (in Brussels, 6-7th February 2010) will host the
"Alt-OS" devroom on sunday from 9:00 to 17:00, organized by members of
the Rosetta OS project.
This devroom is meant as a place for Free and OpenSource Alternative
Operating System projects to share ideas and work on topics like:
* distinguishing design and features,
* device drivers and how to share them,
* sharing code for internal components,
* internal usage of other FOSS projects to build upon,
* application portability,
* interoperability,
* file formats,
* extended attributes...
We are interested to hear about your OS projects, how they are
designed, and what they could eventually share for other projects'
benefit.
In addition to all FOSS OS projects, any application project that is
seeking new target platforms is invited. Featured projects will include
participants from the Rosetta OS project which charter <http://code.google.com/p/rosetta-os/wiki/RosettaOSCharter>
matches our devroom goal.
As time allows, we are also interested in transversal subjects in
cooperation with other devrooms. As an example, possible topics could
include:
* unusual package management with the Crossdistro room,
* standardization of GUI elements and behavior with the Crossdesktop
devroom,
* scalability with the Embedded devroom,
* ways in which BSD drivers were reused in your project,
* concerns about porting Java,
* Gallium3D port progress reports...
The format of the talks can vary, from 45min large speech to 15 min
general project presentation, or hand-on hacking session.
= Proposals =
Proposals should be sent to François Revol by mail: revol(a)free.fr
Your proposal should include:
* duration (in 15 minute blocks -- please stick with that granularity,
as it will make the schedule somewhat easier to follow for visitors),
* activity title (please try to be descriptive, there are ~250 talks
at FOSDEM during the week-end ;)),
* a short abstract (1-2 paragraphs),
* a longer description if appropriate,
* optionally a list of links to the project website or similar
* for each speaker:
* the speaker's real name,
* a short overview of her bio in a couple of lines,
* optionally also a longer bio,
* optionally a picture (please send it to us as 128x128 PNG),
* optionally links to her website, blog, ...
Plain-text format is preferred by the FOSDEM team, it makes their life
easier, something like:
------------------
John Doe
john.doe(a)example.org
John is currently working as a freelancer and spends most of his free
time contributing to various opensource projects, most prominently on
libjohndoe.
John currently lives in England with his wife, 2 kids and a bunch of
kitten. He loves spending his time walking around in the woods, and
of course kitten. He has a masters degree in kitten science, which
helps him a lot with coding.
blog: http://johndoe.example.org/blog/
attached: john_doe.png
------------------
= Deadline =
The deadline for submissions is 2009-12-25, please try to stick to it.
Acceptance notification on 2009-12-31.
= Organization =
The room provided by the FOSDEM team has:
* room number AW1.105 with 48 seats,
* a video projector with VGA cable,
* wireless internet.
We will try to provide a wifi router with ethernet ports for
demonstrations since we know many projects do not have functional wifi
drivers yet.
We will also try to provide a laptop to load your slides on if you
can't use your own machine.
It is advised to see with your project supporting associations for
possible reimbursement of travel and hosting cost, since the FOSDEM
team cannot help there. Attendance is free however.
Also remember to check other devroom calls as well as the call for
lightning talks <http://fosdem.org/2010/call_for_lightningtalks>, for
subjects that might not fit our topics of interest.
= Projected schedule =
9:00 Welcome (15min)
9:15 "Rosetta OS" project
morning project presentations, design...
afternoon more projects, workshops...
16:45 Closing (15min)
