The ReactOS release engineering team has announced release of ReactOS 0.4.6, latest iterative release of independently developed windows binary compatible operating system. This release brings huge improvement in hardware support and fixes several issues to provide a more mature systems.
ReactOS is getting more mature for real hardware resources. ReactOS 0.4.6 fixes various issues associated with dual booting and it uses a corruption free mechanism for handling partitions in hard disk. It can also load custom kernels and HAL( Hardware Abstraction Layer).
Another visible highlight of ReactOS 0.4.6 release is improvement in msstyle appearance. The msstyle theme was introduced with 0.4.5 release, to attract people who prefer a modern look and feel. However, it was not performing well due to various in Shell32, Comctrl32 and Browseui. All theses issues has been fixed in 0.4.6 release so that, msstyle theme is functioning completely. There are other user experience improvements like lock task bar, hide inactive icons, group similar icons ..etc. All these changes will be persisted on reboot.
ReactOS is getting more mature for real hardware resources. ReactOS 0.4.6 fixes various issues associated with dual booting and it uses a corruption free mechanism for handling partitions in hard disk. It can also load custom kernels and HAL( Hardware Abstraction Layer).
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| msstyle theme in ReactOS 0.4.6 (Courtesy : original release announcement) |
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.For more detailed information on ReactOS 0.4.6 release, see original release announcement published on projects website.
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% ratio failure). Still, ReactOS is marked as Alpha for the moment.