Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ReactOS 0.4.6 Released (osnews.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-and-improved dept.

OS News reports that the latest version of ReactOS has been released: 0.4.6 is a major step towards real hardware support. Several dual boot issues have been fixed and now partitions are managed in a safer way avoiding corruption of the partition list structures. ReactOS Loader can now load custom kernels and HALs. Printing Subsystem is still greenish in 0.4.6, however Colin Finck has implemented a huge number of new APIs and fixed some of the bugs reported and detected by the ReactOS automated tests. Regarding drivers, Pierre Schweitzer has added an NFS driver and started implementing RDBSS and RXCE, needed to enable SMB support in the future, Sylvain Petreolle has imported a Digital TV tuning device driver and the UDFS driver has been re-enabled in 0.4.6 after fixing several deadlocks and issues which was making it previously unusable. Critical bugs and leakages in CDFS, SCSI and HDAUDBUS have been also fixed. General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS 0.4.6 is also available. ISO images are ready at the ReactOS Download page.

4 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Too Late? by youngone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have always thought ReactOS was a good idea, but it seems like it's way too late now. It has been in development for so long that it is probably arguable that it's usefulness has been passed by.
    The news of a Digital TV tuning device driver is nice, but why? There are such things as Kodi which work really well.
    ReactOS does not even have SMB support (I suppose, based on the summary) which seems like a really basic thing to not have.
    I hope they wind up with a great, really usable product, but I suspect the interest in this project will be minimal.

    1. Re:Too Late? by tie_guy_matt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It might seem like it is too late for a dos emulator/clone to be very useful today, however people still seem to find a thousand and one household uses for DOSBox, FreeDOS, etc. There are tons and tons of of niche programs that are written to run on older versions of Windows which we don't have the source code for anymore. So I imagine people will be able to find uses for ReactOS well into the future.

    2. Re:Too Late? by YukariHirai · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There are tons and tons of of niche programs that are written to run on older versions of Windows which we don't have the source code for anymore. So I imagine people will be able to find uses for ReactOS well into the future.

      Which will be nice, if/when it's actually capable of reliably running anything.

  2. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not sure what is sueable here

    APIs are not copyright able. See Google vs. Oracle.

      reimplementing win32 APIs is legal.