Submitted by Today marks the fifth release of the ReactOS 0.4.x series, as well as the fifth following the 4 month release cycle started by 0.4.0 itself. Progress has continued steadily, with a great deal of work going on in the background to improve ReactOS’ general usability and stability. Many of these improvements were on display at the FOSDEM convention in Brussels that took place on the 4th and 5th of this month. Certainly one of the more notable albeit less visible additions was the incorporation of basic printing support by Colin Finck. At present ReactOS is only capable of sending print commands to a parallel port printer, but this is the first step towards universal support and Colin should be applauded for his effort.
It seems ReactOS can run Office 2007 now. That’s actually quite neat.
I keep seeing news about this OS and it seems like it is becoming more viable as a main OS each time it’s updated. I keep running it on a virtual machine to see how its going but I look forward to the day I can put it on a partition
It’s less stable than Windows 95. Nope, ReactOS is nowhere near ready to replace Windows 7/8/10.
What about being a “server” low-memory-print replacement to run microservices instances or that stuff?
Like Linux with Wine?
Kind of, but without the overhead of the translation layer.
ebasconp,
Since you brought it up though, I would also be curious about the performance differences between wine and reactos.
Edited 2017-02-17 14:33 UTC
I don’t know how efficient ReactOS’ kernel and systems are but I suspect that much worse than Linux or Windows.
But I thought the same as you: one could customize a ReactOS’ image to be as small as possible and run a Windows’ program in a server. I am thinking specifically of Metatrader or some other trading software.
jgfenix,
I guess you are a trader then? There’s a lot I’d like to learn about that but I don’t know anyone who does it.
This year I started collecting stock market data and writing algorithms to analyze it. I was thinking of throwing a bit of money at it and seeing how well it does, but I’d like to hear from people who have a lot more experience it in than I have.
No, I am just an amateur.
If you want to learn about forex trading the best place is http://www.babypips.com/ Then there are some forums like https://forum.worldwide-invest.org/
For stock trading I don’t know.
It’s still leaking memory everywhere leading to a system crash, and probably still having problems with corrupting it’s own file system. However there was at least one person running their FPGA dev software on it because the Linux version wasn’t any good and it didn’t run on modern Windows versions.
Which is nice and yes a feat. But it cannot print, so back to square one. I hope the OS can print, then it can be more tested, with square one, we need another 10 years of waiting, but life is short. So NO.
Edited 2017-02-18 00:38 UTC
Printing to parallel port works afaik… I’m not sure what you are talking about. It seems a short jump to hook up network printing as well and that is all anyone should really care about.
can you buy these days a (new) printer still using the parallel port? hell, even a PC with such a port is hard to find.
Not sure on printers but maybe some industrial plotters still use the older ports ? My Dell Precision has no such ports but its docking station has them all, Parallel, Serial, VGA, mouse and keyboard (is it ps2?). I have never used them myself though.
From the video the printing appeared to be echo’ing ASCII text to the parallel port. It’s a long, long, way from there to a full stack that can raster full page, full colour data to printers via. proper printer drivers and over the various network & hardware protocols that exist.
ReactOS have the advantage that they’ll be able to make use of the existing Windows printer drivers, but they’ll still have to put together the entire framework to make them run; and Windows printer drivers can have some hooks deep into GDI.
Perhaps as a stopgap someone could port CUPS.
I’m pretty sure GDI is the same system for printing to screen and printers. It’s not necessary a giant leap depending on how it’s setup.
ReactOS Can already run Caligari Truespace and 3D Studio Max. Both applications do not run properly on Linux, and are considered to be major 3D packages. ReactOS has use cases already. What I’d like to see is things like SAMBA file sharing improved, and get ReactOS to host SAMBA 4, DNS, and DHCP, and run Remote Server Admin Tools for Windows… a Remote Desktop client and server would also make it extremely useful for ditching Windows Server licenses.
WINE emulates many functions of Windows and wraps them to linux system calls. The only time WINE directly links application code to WINE Library code is when running a winelib application.