Sticking to the plan of rapid release cycle, ReactOS project has announced availability of ReactOS 0.4.2, latest development image of windows binary compatible, independently evolved open source operating system inspired by windows 9x architecture.
ReactOS 0.4.2 is coming 3 months after previous development release, and this strengthens the hope that, project can continue rapid release cycle in future also.Now the project is more oriented towards this approach and it is possible to see regular updates with these rapid development snapshots.
ReactOS 0.4.2 is coming 3 months after previous development release, and this strengthens the hope that, project can continue rapid release cycle in future also.Now the project is more oriented towards this approach and it is possible to see regular updates with these rapid development snapshots.
The project is reaching a point where rapid releases are viable, where disruption from introduction of major components or restructuring has been greatly reduced from the tumultuous early years and even as recently as the late 0.3.x series. This being the case 0.4.2 presents a fairly incremental update from 0.4.1, primarily because no showstoppers appeared that required the team to wait literally years in order to spin it out. This, ultimately, is a good thing.The project has published a release announcement and release notes for this release which can be used to acquire further information.
Beyond the usual updates to external dependencies such as Wine and UniATA, much work has gone into refining the experience of using ReactOS, especially with respect to the graphical shell and the file explorer. Perhaps the most user visible change however is the ability now to mount and read from several Unix filesystems, namely ext family, ReiserFS, and UFS. Native built-in support for these filesystems should make for considerably easier interoperability than the current out-of-box experience provided by Windows, and there is more to come in the future.