[ros-general] ReactOS 0.3.15 Released

[Ziliang Guo]

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