ReactOS 0.4.6 Released (osnews.com) 97
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.
Too Late? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too Late? (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.
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Re:Too Late? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Which will be nice, if/when it's actually capable of reliably running anything.
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Agreed. The only reason I have an XP VM (the one and only MS existence in this household) is that DW bought me an iPod that libgpod won't communicate with (a generation that has not yet been reverse engineered). I'd switch to ReactOS in a flash if iTunes wasn't a hunk of junk that will not run on it.
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And, given the choice, I think most people would rather just emulate an entire Windows box, run it through Wine (which stands ten times more chance of actually working), or just hack it to run on modern Windows instead.
DOSBox is for games, almost 99% of the time. It's bundled in Steam releases of old games, etc.etc. and it sucks at lots of things (e.g. physical hardware interaction, requires an entire PC set up and running an OS already to work etc.).
As such, ReactOS fills an EVEN TINIER niche. Not for ru
Re: Too Late? (Score:1)
You seem like a very honest person.
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Yet a solution looking for a problem is exactly how a lot of these projects start, and while most fail there are some that take off.
So using your example of the half-million-dollar microscope; what if OEMs pick up on ReactOS and start using that as their base instead of Windows? They already have the Windows coders which is probably why they never made the investment to switch to Linux to run it. Or they felt the APIs weren't there or whatever. Well, if said OEM instead ports their code to ReactOS then they
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Windows can't use many Windows device drivers. Are we really suggesting that ReactOS's hardware compatibility is anywhere close to providing support for hardware that's not supported on Linux? TV tuner cards are pretty much one of the best-supported devices out there, for instance. Only Ethernet cards would beat them, in fact.
ReactOS development may be beneficial to Wine, but surely that's the point... they do more for Wine, and Wine has a much bigger base, that it's not really people using ReactOS so mu
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So... Wine? or QEMU?
Who is going to boot into a full OS just to run an old emulator?
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Do you boot into DOS to play DOS games?
Re:Never Too Late (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?
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Upside: You could guarantee Japan would knock out any NK-aimed nukes heading towards the USA. On top of that, they'll carve an incoming pathway for ours.
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If they are in the underground command and control centers, then the nuke won't effect it really. The blast just crushes/burns everything on top. It might make the underground bunkers a touch warm, though.
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This. You do have to question the whole stack though, things you run on ReatOS, say a third-party browser, could be laden with spyware.
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Besides, ReactOS aims to be a drop-in replacement for Windows (circa Windows 2000/XP), so all that spyware, malware, adware and crippleware? Yup it's going to run on ReactOS just fine. It won't even have to worry about UAP, ASLR or all the rest either. For that matter, ReactOS might pose threats of its own [reactos.org].
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LOL! Your childish, whiny post warranted the reality check. And I call bullshit. You haven't contributed anything to ReactOS or any other open source project. You don't even know how to code.
Now that you have been put in your place I'll let you get back to crying, little boy.
Windows 10 is NOT USABLE! (Score:2)
In my opinion, Windows 10 is NOT USABLE! Can you deliver a computer to a customer when you know what you are delivering is spyware?
Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. [networkworld.com] Quote from that story: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."
To me it seems very likely that some low-level employee at Microsoft, or at one of the
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It may be too late. I still have a need for something Windows-compatible from this era, however, ReactOS still lacks some basic functionality (e.g. drag-n-drop, ^c-^v [tested today in VirtualBox]) and at least one of the programs I regularly use still doesn't work inside ReactOS.
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When Linux goes SystemD for the entire OS configuration and there are no more non-SystemD distros out, we will then need an alternative OS.
Gee, I make it sound like SystemD is a virus? Maybe it is based on how fast and far it's spread...
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The D stands for dick. Because that's what it does to your system.
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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.
Well, I dunno, once it hits 1.0 you could run Xanadu on it.
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Hey, come on. ReactOS is well on it's way to full WinXP-compatibility in only 10 years time.
Although I do think it could have become a usable alternative a few years back; when all those companies were panicking about the impending demise of WinXP, they could have pumped money and resources into ROS and had a drop-in rplacement for XP that wasn't dependent on MS. But instead they acted like the cowards they are, bent over and spread them for MS once again.
Miscreant-o-soft (Score:2)
Re: Miscreant-o-soft (Score:2, Insightful)
Not sure what is sueable here
APIs are not copyright able. See Google vs. Oracle.
reimplementing win32 APIs is legal.
Re: Miscreant-o-soft (Score:5, 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 [eweek.com]. 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 [zerobugsan...faster.net], a lot of situations are probably fair use, including interoperability.
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The letter of the law is that APIs are copyrightable, but the spirit is that reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is allowed.
It's more accurate to say that the letter of the law is that APIs are copyrightable, and the letter of the law is that reverse engineering is fair use.
It just seems ludicrous on its face that you wouldn't be able to run Java work-alike software when Java is freely downloadable from Oracle.
If Google had released their code under the GPL instead of the Apache license, they wouldn't have had a problem (because Sun released Java under the GPL). Overall it shows the importance of respecting licenses.
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I don't see how that would have helped, since nothing in Android is a derivative work of Java.
Specifically, Google's implementation of the Java API is a derivative work of Sun's Java API. The rest of the code is fine.
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I thought Google developed all their own code? Isn't it just the header files they copied from Java?
They did, but they copied the APIs. The court applied the Abstraction, Filtration, Comparison test [copyleft.org], and found that substantial portions of the API were copyrightable. Not the pleasantest of circumstances, but anyway, that's where we are: copying header files can be a copyright violation.
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Right, but just copying them doesn't make their code a derivative work.
Yeah, it does. That's basically what a derivative work is.
Either way it's a copyright violation, but going GPL wouldn't have avoided the infringement.
The reason going GPL would have saved them (and actually, they have now switched to OpenJDK so they are fine) is because then they would have had a license to use it. It's not that the GPL is special, it's that Sun released Java under the GPL. Anyone is free to use it. But since Google released their version under the Apache license, they couldn't claim that defense.
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Re: Miscreant-o-soft (Score:5, 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/... [wikipedia.org].
"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".
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The odd part about that ruling is that it established that APIs are copyrighted, but didn't come up with a single plausible theory of how they could possibly be used in a way that is infringing. If you can copy APIs wholesale to create a competing commercial product you're pretty much in the worst corner of on at least two if not three corners of the fair use test. If the functional nature of interfaces demand that they have to look the same to work the same and will grant you a fair use defense every time
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Would that simply mean that current law is inadequate to cope with software (esp. APIs)?
Somewhat similar to creating an official standard with a patented technology?
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Not sure what is sueable here
I'm not sure it matters if anything is actually sueable. If Microsoft felt sufficiently threatened, they could just throw lawyers and claims at this project until its participants went bankrupt, regardless of whether the claims actually held any merit, or not.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't bothered is probably best explained by the hypothesis that they don't think it's worth the effort (or the bad publicity) because they don't see this OS as any kind of real competition. If so, I think they're right about
Let me know when it reaches Beta (Score:2)
As cool as this is, the pace is glacial. It may get on par with Windows 2000 or XP when we've moved on to 128 bit chips with a TB of RAM and 12K monitors. I don't expect miracles, but it'd be nice to reach a usable status while the old win32 API is still useful.
I think the project bit off more than it could chew with its limited resources.
okay, finally installed it. (Score:2)
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ReactOS and WINE have been working together since practically day one of both projects. Since both are working on the Windows NT API, a fair bit of the code is mutually interchangable (but obviously not 100%). There have been developers who have contributed to both projects. Neither will be absorbed into the other community as if that were to happen it would have happened a long time ago.
As far as interest, you need to keep in mind that Linux floundered a whole lot until IBM took interest.... in part bec
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I know people who run NT 4 in a VM. Maybe you should use a better VM, or a better install ISO.
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more games run on 32bit than exist in 64bit.
Alpha software... (Score:2)
For the last 19 years. When is the beta available?
The Windows clone almost has support for Windows file sharing.
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You don't port Linux drivers to windows, you port Windows drivers to ReactOS.
ReactOS is already useful (Score:3)