The headline feature for 0.4.10 would have to be ReactOS’ ability to now boot from a BTRFS formatted drive. The work enabling this was part of this year’s Google Summer of Code with student developer Victor Perevertkin. While the actual filesystem driver itself is from the WinBtrfs project by Mark Harmstone, much of Victor’s work was in filling out the bits and pieces of ReactOS that the driver expected to interact with. The filesystem stack in ReactOS is arguably one of the less mature components by simple dint of there being so few open source NT filesystem drivers to test against. Those that the project uses internally have all gone through enough iterations that gaps in ReactOS are worked around. WinBtrfs on the other hand came with no such baggage to its history and instead made full use of the documented NT filesystem driver API.
Seems like another solid release. While ReactOS always feels a bit like chasing an unobtainable goal, I’m still incredibly impressed by their work, and at this point, it does seem like it can serve quite a few basic needs through running actual Win32 applications.
Why is it for ReactOS possible, to have one ISO-file for installation and asked at the beginning of the installation in an “Language Selection” area, for your language, whereas Microsoft have for every language an own ISO-file?
Edited 2018-11-07 10:05 UTC
Maybe the Microsoft localization and translation files are much larger.
Yeah, in itself Windows’ binary files are compiled following the target language/region, hence a pretty wide amount of file duplication. Perhaps ReactOS (or Ubuntu) use language independent resource files and inject translated text strings into them (plus a little layout refresh in case of long strings).
Used this methodology as part of my own developments. It’s pretty common though, even InstallShield features this kind of “trick” with its expensive language packs where you just have to provide several translations for your UI elements, and the installer will offer the user the installation language and select the appropriate “column”.
It’s likely a result of how the official Windows installer actually works. Windows install media comes with what amounts to a complete pre-built system image that is only minimally modified during the actual install process. It has one language pack baked-in, and doesn’t provide for any others.
I’m not 100% certain how the ReactOS installer actually works, but I expect it’s something like how the FreeBSD and NetBSD installers work, you have a set of archives that you install, one for each large ‘component’ of the system. Such a design makes it trivial to have multilingual install support, because you just make each language it’s own archive.
Oh it’s certainly possible, see https://i.imgur.com/ZsKkWiQ.jpg
They either see no need for it or have the same dumb reasons as video game publishers.
You should know by now that the road is the goal for OS hobbyists.
For Haiku, yes. But ReactOS has always advertised itself in a very different way. Think of the Thorium Core kickstarter( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thorium/thorium-core-cloud-desk… ) or the ReactOS Community Edition ( https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/reactos-community-edition ) Every time, the promise was about delivering production quality software, not some pre-alpha, that after over twenty years still doesn’t run on most real hardware. And the slick homepage also invokes the impression as if there was an actual there there.
funnily, Haiku installed first time on my MSI Wind u100 netbook with no really issues other than audio and the fact my computer has a non standard resolution, so using an external monitor is a bit b0rked. That is pretty impressive for me. Lat time I tried, nothing really worked and the installer wouldn’t set up the bootloader correctly, so the computer could only boot from an SD card with the install image on it.