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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.

5 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: 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: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?