After a year and a half of development the launch of the new version of the ReactOS 0.4.14 operating system was presented, version in which various changes have been made that greatly improve the user experience, in addition to various system components having been improved.
For those of our readers who still do not know ReactOS I can tell you that this is an open source operating system for PC x86 / x64 designed to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers designed for Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
Therefore, It is important to highlight and understand at this point that ReactOS is not a system that uses the Linux Kernel, It is a system created from scratch that follows the FLOSS development model as an alternative to Windows.
Main new features in ReactOS 0.4.14
In this new version the "Send To" function has been added to the custom Shell, which allows you to send files and directories to predefined locations, such as the "My Documents" section, the desktop or the directory with compressed files, plus the "Open file location" and "Open command prompt here" commands were added to the context menu from the desktop to open the directory with the selected file in the file manager and display the command line dialog box. Scrolling issues have been resolved, some Component Object Model (COM) interfaces have been improved, and regressive changes to the drag-and-drop implementation have been fixed.
Another novelty that stands out is that The networking stack has improved support for the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP), which previously did not cover the entire specification. The new version introduces support for IOCTL_ICMP_ECHO_REQUEST calls and completely rewrites all Icmp * procedures. As a result, network drivers can now successfully send packets with ICMP requests and responses to applications, and the tracert utility displays all the necessary information.
Moreover, work continued to eliminate bugs and increase the stability of the operating system kernel.: improvements were made and some parts of the memory manager were rewritten, Work began on the implementation of PAE (Physical Address Extension) support. Code for handling exceptions moved to CRT (C Run-Time) from Wine codebase.
Added the ability to boot into NEC PC-9800 computers shipped with more powerful processors than the i586 and more than 64MB of RAM. Support for work in the Neko 21 / W Project is also implemented emulator.
It is also highlighted that added initial implementation of Resource Arbiter library which can be used to resolve resource conflicts in bus controllers such as PCI. Also added code to debug I / O and PnP managers. The PnP Manager provides support for mapping device capabilities to indicators that represent those capabilities.
In addition, the kernel debugger has been updated and also several related modules: in the interactive KDBG debugger, the cregs and tss commands have been improved and the TSS processing code has been rewritten. Deployment of debug filters is complete.
The package includes the NetKVM VirtIO driver, which enables you to accelerate network operations in environments running QEMU and KVM-based virtualization systems.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Improved Safely Remove Hardware dialog, now showing connected devices.
- The FreeLoader loader has been improved, with the ability to boot 64-bit systems based on the Linux kernel, and problems with reading the Ext2 FS have been resolved.
- Fixed crashes loading in debug mode. Added ARC emulation is required to support NEC PC-98 hardware.
- Improved download support on Xbox devices.
- The PnP driver (classpnp.sys) fixes bugs that prevented normal operation of storage devices.
- The I / O subsystem has improved interaction with devices.
- Fixed a number of buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
- Updated implementations of the on-screen keyboard and tools for people with disabilities.
- Continuous work on the ISA PnP controller to discover devices on the ISA bus.
- Fixed bugs in the comctl32 (common controls) module that prevented the normal display of the Visual Basic 6 installer.
- Obsolete fonts resulting in small performance gains, lower RAM consumption, and reduced size of system images have been removed.
Si you want to know more about it About the details of this new version, you can check the full list of changes in the following link.
Download ReactOS 0.4.14
If you want to try this operating system can get a system image Going to the official website of the project and in the download section of the page you can find the download link of this new version of the system.
In this section we can find the system in two different versions, one of which is the famous bootcdy LiveCD.
The ISO installation image has a weight of 115 MB and a Live compilation is also offered (in the 85 MB zip file) which are ready to download.