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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.

13 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 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
    4. 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.

    5. 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.

  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.

  3. 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."
  4. 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
  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. 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."
  7. 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."
  8. 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.