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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.

48 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 youngone · · Score: 2

      I hadn't thought of that use case, you might be right. I hope so.

    3. Re:Too Late? by jshackney · · Score: 1

      It may be too late. I still have a need for something Windows-compatible from this era, however, ReactOS still lacks some basic functionality (e.g. drag-n-drop, ^c-^v [tested today in VirtualBox]) and at least one of the programs I regularly use still doesn't work inside ReactOS.

    4. Re:Too Late? by Lady+Galadriel · · Score: 2

      One comment.

      When Linux goes SystemD for the entire OS configuration and there are no more non-SystemD distros out, we will then need an alternative OS.

      Gee, I make it sound like SystemD is a virus? Maybe it is based on how fast and far it's spread...

      --
      Lady Galadriel
    5. Re:Too Late? by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      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.

      Well, I dunno, once it hits 1.0 you could run Xanadu on it.

    6. 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.

    7. Re:Too Late? by eneville · · Score: 1

      Agreed. The only reason I have an XP VM (the one and only MS existence in this household) is that DW bought me an iPod that libgpod won't communicate with (a generation that has not yet been reverse engineered). I'd switch to ReactOS in a flash if iTunes wasn't a hunk of junk that will not run on it.

      --
      Why UNIX?
    8. Re:Too Late? by eneville · · Score: 1

      This. You do have to question the whole stack though, things you run on ReatOS, say a third-party browser, could be laden with spyware.

      --
      Why UNIX?
    9. Re:Too Late? by DrXym · · Score: 1
      And if all things were equal that might be a compelling selling point. But ReactOS isn't remotely close to a polished production ready system and at the pace it's going at it probably never will be.

      Besides, ReactOS aims to be a drop-in replacement for Windows (circa Windows 2000/XP), so all that spyware, malware, adware and crippleware? Yup it's going to run on ReactOS just fine. It won't even have to worry about UAP, ASLR or all the rest either. For that matter, ReactOS might pose threats of its own.

    10. Re:Too Late? by ledow · · Score: 2

      And, given the choice, I think most people would rather just emulate an entire Windows box, run it through Wine (which stands ten times more chance of actually working), or just hack it to run on modern Windows instead.

      DOSBox is for games, almost 99% of the time. It's bundled in Steam releases of old games, etc.etc. and it sucks at lots of things (e.g. physical hardware interaction, requires an entire PC set up and running an OS already to work etc.).

      As such, ReactOS fills an EVEN TINIER niche. Not for running games (there are vanishingly few old Windows games that don't work nowadays), but actually for running ancient Windows business apps (with nothing in the way of ActiveX, etc. integration) on base hardware itself.

      The use case of ReactOS kinda blows it out of the water for anything except the most niche of uses. Literally "this half-a-million-dollar microscope runs from an old version of Windows which we can't get any more because the microscope company refuse to support or supply it, and it literally does almost nothing in terms of physical interaction but MUST run on the old computer inside the microscope". At that point, it's cheaper to bin it and buy another rather than try to get it working on Windows itself, let alone ReactOS.

      Let's be honest, ReactOS is WineOS. As someone who purchased Codeweavers back in the day to run Office 2000 on Linux, so I totally get the use-cases, I can't see a use for ReactOS that would suggest any reasonable amount of development effort being put into it to facilitate that.

      DOSBox is literally bouyed up by people using it to play games. ReactOS is... just a toy, really.

      To be honest, I'd rather efforts were put into making a Linux distro that works kinda-like the old versions of Windows, with a native Wine association for .exe files etc. It would run more, work on modern hardware, and fill those needs people have better.

      At this point, starting up an OS means starting over for every device driver and OS / BIOS interaction. That just means decades of work to get back to where we are again, where even Linux can struggle with Windows-only hardware and deprecates old hardware regularly.

      It's a solution looking for a problem.

    11. Re: Too Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You seem like a very honest person.

    12. Re:Too Late? by Thumper_SVX · · Score: 1

      Yet a solution looking for a problem is exactly how a lot of these projects start, and while most fail there are some that take off.

      So using your example of the half-million-dollar microscope; what if OEMs pick up on ReactOS and start using that as their base instead of Windows? They already have the Windows coders which is probably why they never made the investment to switch to Linux to run it. Or they felt the APIs weren't there or whatever. Well, if said OEM instead ports their code to ReactOS then they get to make minimal investment in change in order to run an open source and free operating system. If they're a good OEM they'll then put some money back into the project to ensure further development work.

      Right now you're right; the current incarnation is a toy. It needs work, it needs development and it needs time to bake. Most important it needs developers and for a proper "face" to sell it to OEMs first and foremost as a new way to do things that requires minimal work on the OEM's part. That'll get us out of this hell of multi-million dollar CNC machines that run Windows 2000 (yes, it's WAY worse than just XP). ReactOS when a bit more mature might just be able to plug into these old machines and just run.

      While there are some OEMs who prefer not to upgrade the OS because they want to sell a new machine, there are many more who actually just don't have the coding resources to port their code to a newer version of Windows that has all new security requirements and has probably dumped several APIs their code relied on. Or drivers... the stability of the driver APIs in Windows has not been good.

      So for my theoretical OEM they can turn around and sell a new "'control unit" for the CNC machine running ReactOS for $50K (yes, quite likely) and they don't need to worry about licensing issues with Microsoft or worry too much about future upgrades as ReactOS is based on the idea that the API's will be static.

    13. Re:Too Late? by ckatko · · Score: 1

      So... Wine? or QEMU?

      Who is going to boot into a full OS just to run an old emulator?

    14. Re:Too Late? by ckatko · · Score: 1

      Do you boot into DOS to play DOS games?

    15. Re:Too Late? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1

      The D stands for dick. Because that's what it does to your system.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    16. Re:Too Late? by jelabarre · · Score: 1

      Hey, come on. ReactOS is well on it's way to full WinXP-compatibility in only 10 years time.

      Although I do think it could have become a usable alternative a few years back; when all those companies were panicking about the impending demise of WinXP, they could have pumped money and resources into ROS and had a drop-in rplacement for XP that wasn't dependent on MS. But instead they acted like the cowards they are, bent over and spread them for MS once again.

    17. Re:Too Late? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      LOL! Your childish, whiny post warranted the reality check. And I call bullshit. You haven't contributed anything to ReactOS or any other open source project. You don't even know how to code.

      Now that you have been put in your place I'll let you get back to crying, little boy.

    18. Re:Too Late? by ledow · · Score: 1

      Windows can't use many Windows device drivers. Are we really suggesting that ReactOS's hardware compatibility is anywhere close to providing support for hardware that's not supported on Linux? TV tuner cards are pretty much one of the best-supported devices out there, for instance. Only Ethernet cards would beat them, in fact.

      ReactOS development may be beneficial to Wine, but surely that's the point... they do more for Wine, and Wine has a much bigger base, that it's not really people using ReactOS so much as those using Wine that are driving development.

      To be honest, quite how much ReactOS is actually deployed is pretty much a mystery and guesswork, but wine is in just about every software repository available.

      It's like FreeDOS vs DOSBox, except FreeDOS has a ton of niche uses (BIOS updates, etc.) that are nowhere near GUI requirements. I have literally never seen a ReactOS box in the wild. But I have FreeDOS disks issued by big-name manufacturers for BIOS/drivers/etc., and seen Wine in use on commercial projects (sometimes even commercial ports).

  2. Miscreant-o-soft by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

    Wonder how far they'll get before Microsoft sics their team of lawyers on them claiming infringement of some sort, sueing them into oblivion, then scooping up the whole project, copyrighting it, and preventing anyone from using it, ever?

    1. 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.

    2. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      Wow, you completely misunderstood that case. APIs most definitely are copyrightable, as per the appellate court. The best you can hope to attain is a fair use defense, which Google tentatively won (though it may or may not be overturned, like I know). Reasonable summary here, a lot of situations are probably fair use, including interoperability.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by 4wdloop · · Score: 4, Informative

      IMNAL but GvsO was "won" based on fair use, in fact the case sided with Oracle that APIs are work of art (some more than other ;-).

      from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

      "On May 26, 2016, the jury found that Android does not infringe Oracle-owned copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is protected by fair use. "

      And since fair use is solved case-by-case, it is rather very "sueable".

      --
      4wdloop
    4. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      The letter of the law is that APIs are copyrightable, but the spirit is that reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is allowed.

      It's more accurate to say that the letter of the law is that APIs are copyrightable, and the letter of the law is that reverse engineering is fair use.

      It just seems ludicrous on its face that you wouldn't be able to run Java work-alike software when Java is freely downloadable from Oracle.

      If Google had released their code under the GPL instead of the Apache license, they wouldn't have had a problem (because Sun released Java under the GPL). Overall it shows the importance of respecting licenses.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by Jeremi · · Score: 1

      Not sure what is sueable here

      I'm not sure it matters if anything is actually sueable. If Microsoft felt sufficiently threatened, they could just throw lawyers and claims at this project until its participants went bankrupt, regardless of whether the claims actually held any merit, or not.

      The fact that Microsoft hasn't bothered is probably best explained by the hypothesis that they don't think it's worth the effort (or the bad publicity) because they don't see this OS as any kind of real competition. If so, I think they're right about that; OTOH the day that ReactOS did become meaningfully useful would probably also be the day that Microsoft decides to bury it.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    6. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      I don't see how that would have helped, since nothing in Android is a derivative work of Java.

      Specifically, Google's implementation of the Java API is a derivative work of Sun's Java API. The rest of the code is fine.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    7. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      I thought Google developed all their own code? Isn't it just the header files they copied from Java?

      They did, but they copied the APIs. The court applied the Abstraction, Filtration, Comparison test, and found that substantial portions of the API were copyrightable. Not the pleasantest of circumstances, but anyway, that's where we are: copying header files can be a copyright violation.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Right, but just copying them doesn't make their code a derivative work.

      Yeah, it does. That's basically what a derivative work is.

      Either way it's a copyright violation, but going GPL wouldn't have avoided the infringement.

      The reason going GPL would have saved them (and actually, they have now switched to OpenJDK so they are fine) is because then they would have had a license to use it. It's not that the GPL is special, it's that Sun released Java under the GPL. Anyone is free to use it. But since Google released their version under the Apache license, they couldn't claim that defense.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      That is true, good point.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    10. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by hummassa · · Score: 1

      I'M Not A Lawyer? seems really obvious

      --
      It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
    11. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by Kjella · · Score: 1

      The odd part about that ruling is that it established that APIs are copyrighted, but didn't come up with a single plausible theory of how they could possibly be used in a way that is infringing. If you can copy APIs wholesale to create a competing commercial product you're pretty much in the worst corner of on at least two if not three corners of the fair use test. If the functional nature of interfaces demand that they have to look the same to work the same and will grant you a fair use defense every time it's just semantics.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    12. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by 4wdloop · · Score: 1

      Would that simply mean that current law is inadequate to cope with software (esp. APIs)?

      Somewhat similar to creating an official standard with a patented technology?

      --
      4wdloop
    13. Re: Miscreant-o-soft by hummassa · · Score: 1

      Oh, I *am* illiterate. Albeit I'm a little bit less illiterate in Portuguese, Italian, English, Spanish, and German than in the other languages. ;-) Fica frio! do na lebna nei tai junri

      --
      It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
  3. Let me know when it reaches Beta by Ramze · · Score: 1

    As cool as this is, the pace is glacial. It may get on par with Windows 2000 or XP when we've moved on to 128 bit chips with a TB of RAM and 12K monitors. I don't expect miracles, but it'd be nice to reach a usable status while the old win32 API is still useful.

    I think the project bit off more than it could chew with its limited resources.

  4. okay, finally installed it. by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

    After all these years of getting updated on the status of ReactOS on Slashdot, I finally install it in a VM. My first thought was, "Am I installing NT 4 or what?" That was kinda cool actually. After installing and rebooting I got a blue screen. Really? Okay, so I restarted the VM and this time the loading screen flat out hung up. If I was installing this on actual hardware, what would it be intended for? A Pentium Pro? If a selling point is a TV tuner device driver...

    --
    Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
    1. Re: okay, finally installed it. by Teancum · · Score: 1

      ReactOS and WINE have been working together since practically day one of both projects. Since both are working on the Windows NT API, a fair bit of the code is mutually interchangable (but obviously not 100%). There have been developers who have contributed to both projects. Neither will be absorbed into the other community as if that were to happen it would have happened a long time ago.

      As far as interest, you need to keep in mind that Linux floundered a whole lot until IBM took interest.... in part because Linux permitted the company to use its mainframe business as a platform for web servers. I don't need to go into details, but that is part of what brought the big $$$ and developer interest into Linux and brought in the Nazgul lawyers to actually defend Linux against Microsoft in that epic battle with SCO. ReactOS doesn't have that sort of support or killer app yet.

      I would imagine if Windows 8 support ends, ReactOS might get a bit of a review though and certainly interest by companies seeking to maintain older Windows machines. I actually know about at least a few new computers that are shipping with Windows 3.1 oddly enough. Old software on new hardware is still a real thing where if it does the job there is no point in getting it updated. While with a whole lot of digging you can get licenses for that ancient OS and even MS-DOS 6.0 or earlier, often it is simply easier to use the open source operating systems like FreeDOS and ReactOS as they support current hardware even if they use the older APIs.

    2. Re:okay, finally installed it. by ckatko · · Score: 1

      I know people who run NT 4 in a VM. Maybe you should use a better VM, or a better install ISO.

  5. Re:Never Too Late by Voyager529 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, if Redmond gets hit with a nuke from N.Korea, then ReactOS is the only way we'll still get updates to Windows in the near future.

    Did you just seriously give everyone an upside to nuclear war with North Korea?

  6. Alpha software... by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

    For the last 19 years. When is the beta available?
    The Windows clone almost has support for Windows file sharing.

  7. Re:Never Too Late by Khyber · · Score: 1

    Upside: You could guarantee Japan would knock out any NK-aimed nukes heading towards the USA. On top of that, they'll carve an incoming pathway for ours.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  8. Windows 10 is NOT USABLE! by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 1

    "ReactOS is superior to the latest version of Windows because it doesn't come with spyware, malware, adware or crippleware."

    In my opinion, Windows 10 is NOT USABLE! Can you deliver a computer to a customer when you know what you are delivering is spyware?

    Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote from that story: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."

    To me it seems very likely that some low-level employee at Microsoft, or at one of the secret agencies that Microsoft supports, or a contractor, will steal information from companies that allow Windows 10 computers to have an internet connection.

    Companies that supply computer systems to businesses could be the target of legal action if information is stolen, it seems to me.

    ReactOS needs world-wide support and much faster development. Every country and the U.N. should support ReactOS so that the Windows OS can be eliminated.

    Paying for top-level development of ReactOS would save governments money. A fully compatible ReactOS would also save citizens HUGE amounts of money.

    No one should think that secret government agencies are always well-managed, or that their actions are always in the interest of all citizens.

    We live in a world in which top-level managers have been introduced to computers in their 30s or 40s, when the managers were always busy. At present, most top-level managers are not fully computer literate. Many are very ignorant. Many managers are not prepared to understand the technical issues they face every day.

  9. Re:Tonight we're gonna party by hummassa · · Score: 1

    This, for me, would be a lot of high-quality drugs and a lot of high-quality sex. So, let me get my blue pills, and count me in. I don't want to live to be 50 anyway... :-)

    --
    It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
  10. Re:Tonight we're gonna party by hummassa · · Score: 1

    In my case (divorced guy in my forties) it's to boink twentysomethings (std creepyness rules x/2+7 says I shouldn't boink under-25) and extract some extra hardness for the second and third rounds. No risk of prison for that.

    --
    It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
  11. ReactOS is already useful by DMJC · · Score: 2

    ReactOS already runs 3D Studio Max and Caligari TrueSpace. That makes it pretty useful to me already. Sure it's running in Qemu, but it already handles window management better than wine does. As it gains in compatibility It's slowly becoming a real replacement for windows in various use cases. I could see it easily replacing Windows Domain Controllers and Windows Terminal Servers in virtualised environments. No license cost, and management UI is close to Windows.

  12. Re:The new "Can it run Linux" meme by DMJC · · Score: 1

    Yes. Quake runs in ReactOS, Hell Skyrim runs on ReactOS.

  13. Re:Never Too Late by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

    If they are in the underground command and control centers, then the nuke won't effect it really. The blast just crushes/burns everything on top. It might make the underground bunkers a touch warm, though.

    --
    -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
  14. Re:Just what we need! by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

    more games run on 32bit than exist in 64bit.

    --
    -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
  15. Re:Seems more stable by arkane1234 · · Score: 1

    You don't port Linux drivers to windows, you port Windows drivers to ReactOS.

    --
    -- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!