10 Apr
2020
10 Apr
'20
6:43 p.m.
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
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