Download ReactOS 0.4.6

Version 0.4.6 of ReactOS has been released. The React Operating System is an open source operating system that aims to be compatible with Windows NT, 2000 and XP to run Windows applications and drivers. Although it already runs a lot of software without any problems, including LibreOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, and several games, the developers say the entire project is still in its alpha stage and not suitable for everyday use. on this page some screenshots of ReactOS can be viewed. The release notes for this release can be found below.

ReactOS 0.4.6 Released

The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.6 as a continuation of its three month cadence. 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.

The 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.

Pierre Schweitzer has added an NFS driver and started implementing RDBSS and RXCE, needed to enable SMB support in the future. Sylvain Petrolle has enabled BDAsup, a library used by Digital TV tuning device drivers and the UDFS driver has been re-enabled in 0.4.6 after fixing several deadlocks and issues which was making it previously problematic. Critical bugs and leakages in CDFS, SCSI and HDAUDBUS have been also fixed.

From the Compatibility point of view, 0.4.6 introduces an initial implementation of our new shim engine as part of the new application compatibility framework. This shim engine, written by Mark Jansen, will enable ReactOS to provide support for new versions of Windows, allowing it to run win32 applications designed for modern version of Windows. It’s disabled by default for now, but can be enabled through the ReactOS registry. We’ll go into this in much more detail in the next release. On the back of this, 0.4.6 also includes a special NTDLL library that exports some of the Vista+ functions needed by newer software in the future.

0.4.5 introduced msstyle themes in ReactOS, allowing you to switch to something different, more modern if you don’t like the Classical visual style. In 0.4.6, and thanks again to your donations, Giannis has fixed lots of bugs in Shell32, Comctrl32 and Browseui, so now msstyle themes are fully working. In 0.4.6, efforts were made to improve the user experience. “Lock Taskbar”, “Hide inactive icons”, and “Group similar taskbar buttons” settings are properly remembered now each time you reboot ReactOS. Explorer’s taskbar is finally resizable. Tiled, centered and stretched wallpapers are correctly placed now. Explorer’s address bar is much improved, and now works nicely with symlinks. The clipboard has gone through a massive fixup, making it more usable and reliable.

0.4.6 is much more stable now as a result of several memory manager, ntoskrnl and filesystem fixes. To name a few, mapping a view of the physical memory sections works now, several MM and NTOS leakages were plumbed, and NTOS:IO critical bugs were fixed. Several buffer overflows and overruns, logic issues and dead code detected by Coverity and other tools have been fixed, leading to less corruptions and leaks.

Eric Kohl has implemented NETAPI, the network transport and security library. Peter Hater has reworked WinSock2. Several bugs affecting rendering performance, NtGDI, brushes, and shape creation are now fixed thanks to James Tabor, Mark Jansen, and Thomas Faber. Amine Khaldi has synced Wine, and tons of other third party modules needed for 0.4.6. Font substitution and font breaking issues have been fixed by Katayama Hirofumi MZ and Giannis. ReactOS now supports the Esperanto language thanks to Mike Swanson and lot of contributors have contributed with translations and patches.

In order to track ReactOS compatibility with Windows behavior, 1,088,893 unit test cases have been added since 0.4.5. This new release has been tested through 14,238,159 unit test cases, failing just 18.419 (a 0.129% failure ratio). Still, ReactOS is marked as Alpha for the moment.