ReactOS 0.4.0

[Jo22]

ReactOS 0.4.3 has been released.

Thank you very much for letting us know !

I'm trying to download 0.4.3 now, but I can't find the qemu version.
Guess I'm just not used to the new site design - any idea where that page or link is ?

Best regards,
Jo22

[gerwin]

There is the Boot-CD and the Live-CD. I just use the Boot-CD to install the OS in my local VirtualBox Portable, overwriting the previously installed version with the ReactOS setup program.
I don't know if there are downloads available of a Virtual Machine, like QEmu, together with the OS v0.4.3. They sometimes offer these, but there is no guarantee.

[gerwin]

ReactOS 0.4.4 has been released today.

Unofficial ChangeLog here:
Work-in-progress 0.4.4 changelog

I haven't tried this one yet, but tried 0.4.4-RC1 before. Although the 'under the hood' changes may be important, I could not really notice them in my use cases. Hopefully for 0.4.5 there will be some fancy things like initial USB device support and USB boot support (to try this OS on real hardware without wasting CDs). Maybe an explorer options panel? Another thing that seems to go forward nicely is a new font engine. Work for office 2010 support was started but seems to have stalled since a few weeks ago, as the installer requires custom Windows Services to install and run. On the other hand Word 2007 and Code::Blocks IDE support was recently demonstrated, at the FOSDEM 2017 event that is.

[gerwin]

No ReactOS 0.4.5 yet. But maybe some of you could consider voting. If I understand it correctly voting is only today. Current vote count is 126 (2nd) and 97 (shared 6th).

ReactOS has been selected as one of the most important projects in two different categories in the OpenAwards, an international opensource event based in Madrid. The 5 most voted will be widely announced, PRed, and finally one of them will be selected as a winner. The exposure is a need for us, you know that, so please help us by casting a vote. Takes just a second.

• Best Opensource Community
• ( Most innovative project )

Instructions:
- Find ReactOS in each link.
- Click in the button which says "Votar" (Vote) next to it.
- It asks for a Name, Surname, an a valid email. Please confirm the vote!.
- Done.

[Jo22]

No ReactOS 0.4.5 yet.

Good news! It is there now!

By the way, they also have a shop, which I didn't noticed before. The bag is really nice, I think.
They described it as a "A zipped Retro Bag to carry all the debuglogs!or your null-serial modem cable!" They know their users, haha. ^^
Furthermore they wrote "As hip as 1979 and spacious as a Marty McFly’s bag"

[konc]

By the way, they also have a shop, which I didn't noticed before.
...

I wasn't aware of it either. I did pay it a visit after reading your post with good intentions, you know, maybe spend some money in support. First thing I saw was a 18+ euros mouse pad, which also made it the last right away.

[gerwin]

Good news! It is there now!

Yeah, I had 0.4.5 installed in VirtualBox already. But I did not have the time to install software that shows off any 0.4.5 improvements. Well, theming works, I did notice that, and it is significant. The audio part of ReactOS could use some attention, that would make it more fun to try games, or just DOS games in the internal DOS emulator.

[Jo22]

By the way, they also have a shop, which I didn't noticed before.
...

I wasn't aware of it either. I did pay it a visit after reading your post with good intentions, you know, maybe spend some money in support. First thing I saw was a 18+ euros mouse pad, which also made it the last right away.

Yeah, the 18€ are hefty for a mouse pad.. Guess it's priced like that, because the shop dudes thought it was
the only "real" computer item, so it had to be priced accordingly. Or something like that.

Well, theming works, I did notice that, and it is significant.

Cool, I like the theming feature. I'll try if I can get some Royale-like themes/visual styles working. ^^

The audio part of ReactOS could use some attention, that would make it more fun to try games, or just DOS games in the internal DOS emulator.

I fully agree! I think there was a way to manually enable it by using AC97 or SB16 drivers (from NT4 ?).
But this was very difficult and involved carrying registry settings over from Win NT.
I think I got it working once, but that was a few years ago (I kept a few screenshots from that time).
I'd be great if ReactOS Team could make it a bit easier.

[gerwin]

The audio part of ReactOS could use some attention, that would make it more fun to try games, or just DOS games in the internal DOS emulator.

I fully agree! I think there was a way to manually enable it by using AC97 or SB16 drivers (from NT4 ?).
But this was very difficult and involved carrying registry settings over from Win NT.
I think I got it working once, but that was a few years ago (I kept a few screenshots from that time).
I'd be great if ReactOS Team could make it a bit easier.

I found installing the sound driver is quite easy, especially in the latest versions. You have to configure VirtualBox with "Hostdriver = Windows Directsound" and "Controller = ICH AC97". In the ReactOS Applications Manager there is a Drivers sections with the AC97 for Virtualbox. When you manually put the two included files in the proper ReactOS subfolder it should install itself with two reboots:
C:\ReactOS\inf\alcxwdm.inf
C:\ReactOS\system32\drivers\alcxwdm.sys

When doing this I hear the startup sound of the OS when the desktop appears. And the ReactOS media player has audio. But the few games that I tried are silent: GZDoom/RedAlert/SolitaireSuite/My Allegro game/Warcraft(DOS). Maybe I am missing something.

[Jo22]

Thanks for that piece of Information!
Bye the way, do you know anything about the increased system requirements ?
Back then I dreamed of having a copy of ReactOS running on an old low-end PC in the garage.
It should have become my main PC for my electronics corner. ReactOS 0.3.1 ran there just fine.
Now, the current version of ReactOS now requires three(!) times the RAM. Is that true ?
Or did they just change it to reflect real-world requirements (and 0.4.5 really just
works as good with low memory as 0.3.x did).

[gerwin]

Sorry, no idea about the difference in requirements. (I do remember reading about some guy keeping track of idle memory usage, and his discussion of a single added MB; wheter that was necessary. Just to say: the Devs seem reluctant to raise memory usage unless really necessary for functionality.)

[Jo22]

Ah, okay. Thank you. I was just a bit surprised about it. In my VMs I'm running Win98 with 96MiB of memory also.
Don't know why, but for some reason boot-up with that amount of memory was the quickest there (a sweet-spot so to say).
And that's why I wondered if ReactOS really required the same amount as a minimum now.
I basically wondered, if these 96MiB were some kind of magic number or something like that.
(ie, why didn't they choose the more common 64MiB or 128MiB as a min. requirement ?)

[gerwin]

ReactOS 0.4.6 has been released. The announcement presents a summary of the most significant changes and has links to more detailed changelogs and test results. Not much to add to that.
I read about their 'Google summer of code' projects in the past months, like NTFS file system support. The logs were well presented. Still, most of the GSoC 2016 and 2017 contributions are not yet available in the main branch.

I am no veteran on using emulators, so only recently I found the download location for the VirtualBox 'Guest Editions' driver packages:
http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/ Just to try whether this enables some more graphics driver features. It installs and works. An Improvement?; Don't know yet.

Edit: I think I will skip this 0.4.6 one and keep a recent daily build instead. That is because this important 'copy/paste' fix did not come in time for 0.4.6: https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-12355

[gerwin]

ReactOS 0.4.7 has been released. Check out the link for the announcement, which lists the new and/or improved features.

[gerwin]

ReactOS 0.4.8 has been released. Check out the link for the announcement, which lists the new and/or improved features, as well as fixes.

[keenmaster486]

A while ago, I thought this project was all but dead, and would probably not go anywhere in the long run.

Maybe it has more promise than I thought. I could see this eventually being, at the least, a viable Windows XP drop-in replacement for retro PCs. In fact, I could even see it becoming a better OS than XP. This would take a long, long time, but the advantage they have is continued development over a very long period of time for the same target.

Think 30, 40, 50 years from now. We'll all be old geezers, but what will the next generation be doing? Won't they get bored with the latest Intel-AMD xCore ia9 32-core 6.8GHz 128-bit processors and nVidia Visiox 99500 NEXGEN GPUs?

"Dude, I got ReactOS running on my Pentium 4 machine!"
"Broski. Let's hear it for my dude with the sick retro box."

EDIT: To clarify, it's like today with our DOS machines. We can do things on DOS nowadays that nobody ever dreamed of in the 90's... even to the point of having an entirely new OS (FreeDOS) which, in certain respects, is "better" than MS-DOS (and, more importantly, is being actively developed)... or with various newly minted hardware upgrades that were never available back in the day... or new utilities like DJGPP still being developed... or the wealth of support information being dumped into the Internet all the time for these old machines... won't it be the same for XP-based stuff in the future? People who were born after the heyday of XP (like I was born after the heyday of DOS) might look at ReactOS the same way I look at FreeDOS and all this new stuff for DOS and DOS-based computers.

[Matth79]

Looks like a moving target though, if they want to include NT6 support

[Jo22]

Thanks for the news! :)

[gerwin]

Another release version of ReactOS is available since today: ReactOS 0.4.9 announcement.

[gerwin]

Since today a new release version is availabe for testing: ReactOS 0.4.10 announcement. Much appreciated! They also prepared a video presentation for this release.
It has been a while since I updated my virtual machine installation, so surely I will try out v0.4.10 myself.