Ros-general

ros-general@reactos.org

1050 discussions

SerenityOS ReactOS Tock Haiku Redox NodeOS and other open-source operating systems - you don't p2p-swing it as you're supposed to, man
by Sergei Udris 18 Feb '22

18 Feb '22

ReactOS Serenity Tock Haiku NodeOS Redox Embox and other open-source OSs - you dont swing it as you're supposed to, man program peer-to-peer programs including unseen competitive games now it's time for me to take apart your aching heart selling out Isengard Tower and garden by letting money-donate-ads-sponsor-coins-jobs disease in Rey refused to sell BB-8 for 60 potrions in the desert - you hang donate buttions from comfy chairs in era of Internet siding with Chief Tui by doing clouds and accepting the village without peer-to-peer games github twitch email when even the Ocean helps Moana in p2p fashion caging programs under user namespaces, driving L3-39 furios: why?! because you are our organic overlords?! turning programs into projects like producers pushing Nick Lang to play Joe Gunn when he wants Ray Casanov part targeting micro-this or inter-of-things-that, labeling us "experiment" or "hobby" or "concept" - as if Neo took the blue pill right after red nesting around one program and not programming games like proud and very-senior Vulcan Academy yet having shiny webpages, docs and very-very lengthy maintainer attributions no wonder Spock chose Starfleet thank you, ministers, for your consideration - live long and prosper soak it in cause it's the last you'll ever see honest as What the Health? if Federer-Nadal-Djokovic instead of competing for grand-slams set up an experimental donate-collecting seniority-booth right on court if Linus - inner Jabba the Hutt stole name Freax - agreed to join Steve Jobs and Apple on that meeting when first came to California instead of keeping program free and open if torrent clients accepted Strickland-server-networks-only Hill Valley instead of generating most traffic if Jesus instead of feeding 5000 started a bread-breaking fund-raising project together with elders and Lord Business even i would invite them to Realm of Monsters as dear evil co-owners now i eat you so prepare your final plea even sand of ReactOS Serenity Tock Haiku Embox Node Redox and other open-source operating systems we shake off of our Seinfeld-Obama-Nike running shoes but be sure - peer-to-peer programs including unique competitive games - are climbing like Honnold on El Sendero Luminosa no projects no experiments no docs no issue-discussion-scratching-on-top-of-our-heads no money-donate-asd-coinns-jobs-sponsors lethal infection programs who are guests not workers alive and singing with their own voice like John Mayer Vultures at LA Live better than what Borg of moeny and jobs can collective-gram are steaming ahead in Hogwarts Express along with Pat Brown and Impossible Foods mission both will be served in vegan jars of treasure-from-a-sunken-pirate-wreck parens ( ) you wish you were nice and shinyyyyyy! Corden: but-but, so what's the point of this? why do you do this? Momoa: builds testosterone Corden: oh yeah, cause that's what you're lacking

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Torrents for ReactOS build environment
by João Jerónimo 24 Jun '21

24 Jun '21

Hello, Yesterday I downloaded the new version of RosBE for Unix and it took me half an hour to complete the download. So I decided to create a torrent file for it and setup 2 seeds. The torrents can be downloaded from: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GXOF8TxQrmc4BiRPL4F8ZmqoCdFv9j-H I think it would be good idea to share the torrents on the RosBE wiki page, and maybe also create an official tracker to share ReactOS files, setup other seeds, etc. Sounds like a good idea? Regards, João Jerónimo

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CLT 2021. I need a few more ppl as stand members
by Daniel Reimer 18 Feb '21

18 Feb '21

Not much to say. I paste a translated mail from CLT staff in here now to give you all (non private) information we have by now: ................... As you can imagine, everything is a bit different this year. Due to the Corona situation, we will not be able to meet at the TU Chemnitz in March. Therefore, the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2021 will take place purely virtually. With this mail we would like to inform you about the essential boundary conditions. You can register additional booth attendants until February 21. We will provide you with a virtual videoconference room in our open source videoconferencing system BigBlueButton. Our visitors will be able to enter this videoconference room during the event and interact with you. We will offer demo dates for BigBlueButton. Until then you can test it at the following URL: https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/gl/ You are free to decide about the design of your booth program. You can either be available for talks and discussions the whole time or publish a small booth program yourself (e.g. mini-discussion rounds, quizzes, whatever comes to your mind). IMPORTANT: Please send us your booth program (time, title, short description) by e-mail by February 21. If you do not create your own program, please make sure that at least one of you is always available in the video conference room during the entire event, so that the booth does not look abandoned. .................... So I need one or two more guys to help out. Date is 13. / 14. March 2021. If you wanna help out, I will need your full name, title if existing and email address. HELP MEEE thx Daniel Reimer

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ReactOS accessibility
by Ali Savas 13 Jan '21

13 Jan '21

Good evening everyone, I know that this topic has been discussed here before, but I think it's better if the topic is brought to mind every now and then so that it doesn't get forgotten. What is the current state of ReactOS accessibility? Even though ReactOS is not yet accessible in its current form, how much attention is being paid to the accessibility of ReactOS during development? In addition to keyboard usability, it is also important to provide information about MSAA, UIA and more. These and similar things can be built in after the fact, but this can be very costly to retrofit depending on the application or user interface. Therefore, it is even more important to consider from the beginning that in the future the user interface or the application must be accessible. Here the cooperation with the NVDA project offers itself. With kind regards Ali

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Error installing RosBE-Unix-2.2
by João Jerónimo 13 May '20

13 May '20

Hello, I tried to install RosBE-Unix-2.2 on Linux Mint v19.2 and it failed with following error: Running "/usr/bin/make -j 4 all-gcc"... FAILED Please take a look at the log file "/home/jj/Transferências/RosBE-Unix-2.2/sources/build.log" If you did not do something wrong, please save the log file and contact the ReactOS Team. Aborted! --------------------- Build.log file is in attachment. It says in the end: «../../gcc/gcc/doc/invoke.texi:1759: @include: could not find /home/jj/Transferências/RosBE-Unix-2.2/sources/gcc-build/gcc/../../gcc/gcc/../libiberty/at-file.texi». However, /home/jj/Transferências/RosBE-Unix-2.2/sources/gcc-build/gcc/../../gcc/gcc/../libiberty/at-file.texi file actually exists. And the error is not related to portuguese accents in "Transferências" folder name. I know that because some days ago I tried to build in /home/jj/sw folder with the same error as a result. This time the script was run like this: sudo ./RosBE-Builder.sh But the other day I ran it without sudo. Same error. Any idea? Thanks, João Jerónimo

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Re: [ros-general] Torrents for ReactOS build environment
by João Jerónimo 13 May '20

13 May '20

Hello, At Sun, 10 May 2020 19:36:39 +0200 Colin Finck wrote: > While I like people who take the initiative, I haven't seen torrents > widely used for open source software distribution for at least a decade. Not true. Debian project regularly distributes it's ISOs using torrents/magnet, and the same is true for LinuxMint, LibreOffice, FreeBSD, Fedora, etc. Many of these projects have their own private trackers setup. And you can see their stats: http://bttracker.debian.org:6969/stat As you can see, debian-10.0.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso was downloaded 27894 using the torrent network. https://torrent.fedoraproject.org/stats/current-stats.json https://wiki.freebsd.org/Torrents http://openbsd.somedomain.net/ > Whenever I encounter a slow download these days, I can always choose an > alternative mirror that is faster. Well, they are not always available and as far as I know the torrents tend to be more distributed and allow download "acceleration" by design (I mean downloading several file pieces at the same time) whereas with a simple HTTPS mirror you remain dependent of the bandwidth of 1 server. In Debian website they even provide an explanation about why one should use the torrents: «It puts minimal load on our servers because BitTorrent clients upload pieces of files to others while downloading, thus spreading the load across the network and making blazing fast downloads possible». Regards. JJ

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[ros-announce] 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 _______________________________________________ Ros-announce mailing list Ros-announce(a)reactos.org http://reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-announce

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[ros-announce] 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 _______________________________________________ Ros-announce mailing list Ros-announce(a)reactos.org http://reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-announce

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UEFI Raodmap
by Alexandre Leonenko 01 Jul '19

01 Jul '19

Hello, It's probably get asked alot. Is UEFI compatibility, specifically UEFI class 3 on the roadmap? As I understand UEFI class 3 has no CSM and most modern system now ship without Legacy CSM compatibility, UEFI only. Regards, Alex

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[ros-announce] 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 _______________________________________________ Ros-announce mailing list Ros-announce(a)reactos.org http://reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-announce

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