[ros-general] ReactOS 0.3.11 Released

[Marius Przybylski]

You should do such writings more often Ged. It's a real pleasure to 
read. Probably because you're a native english speaker.


-
Marius Przybylski (SuperDog)



Ged Murphy wrote:
>
> The ReactOS team is proud to announce the release of ReactOS 0.3.11. 
> This release has been delayed by quite some time due to various 
> blocker bugs which manifested each time we tried to release. A lot of 
> time has gone into hunting down these bugs and various steps have been 
> taken to try to ensure we don't hit this problem again. This isn't to 
> say we don't have a lot of new and exciting features in this release. 
> Two of which stand out are the huge changes to the Memory Manager and 
> another leap forward for the sound stack
>
> It's difficult to sum up all of the changes which have taken place in 
> the memory manager short of saying it's been almost a total rewrite. 
> These changes have not only brought a much more stable and reliable 
> component, but also now includes support for ARM processors. ARM 
> memory management units (MMU’s) are handled in an entirely different 
> manner than that of x86 and x86-64 MMU’s, however the ARM Mm component 
> has been written alongside the x86 component with various areas 
> sharing code when possible. Further to this, these changes bring much 
> improved compatibility with WinDbg. WinDbg support is now at a level 
> where the majority of everyday features are working and tasks which 
> previously seemed so distant using WinDbg, such as stepping through 
> the kernel, listing process threads or dynamically editing memory are 
> now working. We're now at a level where having PDB's (Microsoft's 
> debugging symbols) would make debugging the reactos kernel a similar 
> experience to debugging the Windows kernel, with the added advantage 
> of source mode.
> For the technically inquisitive, here 
> <http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/ChangeLog-0.3.11#MM> are the Mm 
> changes in this release
>
> The sound stack continues to see extensive work throughout all areas. 
> This release brings with it support for wave recording and mixer 
> support such as volume level adjustment and muting. Improved core 
> component compatibility with WinXP means that more components now run 
> within Windows and goes some way to showing the level of compatibility 
> the sound stack is now achieving.
>
> Compatibility and stability changes have been continuing throughout 
> the entire operating system with a great deal of fixes coming from the 
> Wine test framework used to ensure application interface compatibility.
>
> As this is the 0.3.11 release, we felt a certain degree of nostalgia 
> towards 'Windows 3.11 for workgroups' and added a fun easter egg in 
> tribute. See if you can spot it, the older generation will surely have 
> no problems
>
> Along with the rest of the 0.3 series, this release is still 
> considered alpha quality software so it may not run all your apps or 
> run on your hardware.
>
>
>       Changes summary
>
> A detailed consolidation of all changes can be found in the changelog 
> <http://www.reactos.org/wiki/index.php/ChangeLog-0.3.11>. A sum up of 
> some of the more important changes is as follows:
>
>     * A rewrite of the kdcom kernelmode library which is now much more
>       compatible with the Microsoft version. This allows for improved
>       built-in support for WinDbg
>     * Support for delay loaded dlls has been added in our build tools,
>       providing delay loading functionality for our shipped libraries
>     * Support for Chinese and Korean fonts has now been added
>     * A new handler has been written for setting and getting system
>       wide parameters (see SystemParametersInfo API), now making it
>       much more complete and compatible with the Windows implementation
>     * A selection of application compatibility improvements can now
>       been seen, including Opera, Open Office, Firefox 3.5, VLC1.1 and
>       skype
>     * For fun, a new Spider Solitaire application has been added
>     * Synchronization of most of the Wine usermode DLLs and some Win32
>       subsystem code shared with Wine
>
>
>           VirtualBox install note
>
> A bug has surfaced meaning that installing ReactOS in VirtualBox will 
> result in a hang when loading the USB driver, unless the VM has 256Mb 
> RAM or more. To counteract this, either raise the RAM from the default 
> 192Mb or disable the USB device. We have created a preloaded 
> VirtualBox VM for download incorporating this workaround. Apologies 
> for any inconvenience caused.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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