Submitted by The team behind ReactOS, the NT-compatible open source operating system, have released ReactOS 0.3.10, which comes with many improvements aimed towards making it easier to run ReactOS on real hardware.
The two biggest areas of focus for this release are the new Universal ATA driver and improvements in the USB stack. The new Universal ATA driver adds support for Serial ATA disk drives as well as partitions greater than 8GB. The improvements to the USB stack increase the compatibility with USB keyboards and mice.
There are still bugs in these areas, though. “These features are still under heavy development and have several known bugs,” the ReactOS team warns, “but their inclusion should allow more people to run ReactOS on real hardware and are part of the extensive work to make ReactOS usable as an every day operating system.”
This release is still considered alpha quality, so know what you’re getting into. You can grab the new release from the download page.
Check out the youtube vid for a preview of 0.3.10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhTYoxoazCc
Nice
In case anyone is offended by the lyrics in the music track, I’d just like to state that contrary the ‘reactosorg’ username, this video isn’t an official video from the ReactOS team.
I’ve requested video be taken down whilst the audio is edited. It will be back up once complete.
Appologies for any inconvenience.
…because turning down your volume was too inconvenient? I never get offended by things I can simply tune out.
no, it’s just about common decency and trying to maintain a professional look.
Not everyone wants to be greeted by a flurry of F and N words and it’s a little irresponsible to expect children to just ‘turn the volume down’
Anyway, the revised video is now up. Again, appologies for any inconvenience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKUrXAW97WY
My sensibilities were far more offended by the “music” itself than by any lyrics.
Professional look? On YouTube? What the hell are you on, angel dust?
Anyway, congrats, I guess you got what you want. More f***ing censorship, as if there’s not enough of that being forced upon us all already. Great. Why not have them change the video stream to Easter bunnies and fairies next?
Hint: You know that volume control on your speakers? Yeah, that one. Learn to use it.
Edited 2009-07-06 21:24 UTC
Cool stuff.
Oooh…the children, the children. God forbid the “children” hears something that they might not understand. The ruination of this country (US) is precisely because of “the children”.
On topic….Kudos to ReactOS team. Looking forward to Beta!!!!
Thank you for the video. I’m going to have to give ReactOS another try soon.
The poor performance ( ie, couldn’t get it to run at all) on real hardware has been one of the things that has sort of held me back from React. I’ll give it another try. My personal Windows usage has really tailed off in recent years, hopefully React can soon take over the remaining windows workload.
Kudos to the reactos team, i hope this version has better perfomance in virtualbox. Downloading it right now
I know I might be asking for too much but has anyone tried whether actual hardware drivers work? For example, nVidia drivers for XP, SBLive! etc.
Edited 2009-07-06 21:04 UTC
I do not post much, hardly in here, but seeing how far React OS has gone from its conception I can only say congrats and keep up the good work.
Why is it that they’re writing drivers?
Surely it would make more sense to improve their implementation of windows to the point that it can use existing windows drivers, of which there are literally millions…
I’d like to know as well. Impressive progress nevertheless.
Windows comes with a myriad of base drivers which include both generic drivers and support drivers.
If ReactOS didn’t implement these generic drivers then you wouldn’t even be able to install ReactOS, let alone run it.
For example, without filesystem drivers you would have no way of installing the OS into the disk.
Without bus drivers none of your pci cards would work.
Without video drivers you would have no screen.
Without network drivers you wouldn’t be able to get on the internet to update your OS with your prefered drivers
etc, etc.
There are core drivers which must be present and are not available via 3rd party means. These provide the basic framework and serve as a base for your 3rd party mini filter drivers to attach to. So for example the network stack is built up of various drivers like tcpip, afd, tdi, etc. We then provide the generic drivers for chips like pcnet and ne2000 so your network works ‘out of the box’ as they aren’t freely available elsewhere.
You are then free to install your driver of choice at a later stage if you so wish.
Other examples are things like the base USB drivers (ohci, uhci, etc), serial drivers, parallel drivers, i8042prt drivers, pci drivers, isapnp drivers, acpi drivers, floppy drivers, etc. These simply aren’t available anywhere to download so we must implement them as they are core to the OS.
Makes perfect sense, thanks for taking the time to explain.
As was said, there needs to be a certain amount of basic drivers in there that you can actually install ReactOS at all. But what the other poster didn’t say and I thought to mention:
There are a lot of drivers in Windows and it would be very easy to just grab those, make sure they work in ReactOS and then bundle them with it. But the problem is that those drivers are proprietary and as such you are not allowed to ship them with ReactOS. Would be good if the drivers were free, ReactOS devs could cut quite a lot of development time then :/
Here is info on how to contribute to Wine:
Contributing to Wine –
“Many projects can be performed even if you are not a C programmer or if you don’t have an intricate knowledge of the Windows internals. Let us know if you are interested in tackling a given project.”
http://www.winehq.org/contributing
How exactly is Wine more patent-threat proof than ReactOS?
Well, a patent protects an invention, or if you will “an implementation of an idea”.
What this means in practice is that it should have been possible (and was) to get a patent on the formula for paracetemol, as an example, but it should not be possible to patent the idea of a “headache tablet” itself. So neurofen wouldn’t infringe on the patent for panadol, even though both were headache tablets, because neurofen is a different formula and it works in a different way.
OK, with me so far?
Wine works by intercepting the calls a running program makes to the OS, and it determines if the running program is a Windows executable, and if so it interprets the parameters as if this were a call to the win32 ABI, and Wine then translates these to equivalent parameters for a call to the underlying Linux kernel and drivers. Wine does the reverse things with the results returned.
ReactOS works by passing the parameters directly to an entry point in a loaded dll.
In short, ReactOS tries to work exactly like Windows, whereas Wine tries to achieve the same things as Windows in an entirely different way. Wine is to Windows as neurofen is to paracetemol. ReactOS is to Windows as a paracetemol ripoff is to paracetemol.
Therefore, ReactOS is far, far more likely to infringe any patent, assuming there is a valid patent, on Windows ABI.
Mind you, having said all that, there is COPIOUS prior art on ABIs for Operating Systems, so IMO it is very, very unlikely that there is indeed any valid patents involved here.
Edited 2009-07-08 05:35 UTC
I knew that the name “astralknight” sounded familiar so I checked it out. He used to post the same comments on Digg, but sometime in the last month, he was banned (a month ago was the last time I was on Digg).
There’s also an astralknight on Reddit that posts the same stuff as well.
Is there a way to report trolling on osnews?
We all know that there was a major hijack of the thread up until a few minutes ago, and it became so apparent that I simply just removed all posts (no matter how relevant, funny, intelligent, or the opposite) after a certain point where the thread turned into wasted bandwidth. I’m sorry to those who had intelligible and intriguing comments as there were many of you, but you all know the procedure. Please continue the thread as if nothing had happened, and I hope you can hold it in your hearts to forgive the removal of your most interesting comments. If you can’t, feel free to blame me personally.
Edited 2009-07-07 05:19 UTC
How many subversions will versin 3.* have? According to Reactos.org, next Reactos relise will be 3.11. As I recall (correct me if I’m wrong), 2.* series ended wigh version 2.9, so1836 tl when will 4.0 arrive?