A maintenance update improving the shell and Win32 subsystem

May 21, 2017 21:01 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind ReactOS, an open source project attempting to create a free computer operating system that's 100% compatible with Windows binaries, announced the release of ReactOS 0.4.5.

ReactOS 0.4.5 is a maintenance update that adds numerous changes and improvements over the previous point release. The kernel has been updated in this version to improve the FreeLoader and UEFI booting, as well as the Plug and Play modules, adding support for more computers to boot ReactOS without issues.

The Memory Manager and Common Cache areas of the kernel have been improved as well in ReactOS, which no longer becomes unbootable when creating a system partition, and it now avoids attempts to reinstall a driver during reboot when a previous attempt already failed.

Taking about drivers, ReactOS 0.4.5 includes various fixes and speedups for the FAT32 driver, addresses a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) that occurred when changing floppy drives, correctly reports processors to the system, and patches some USB leaks.

Theming improvements, reworked and improved commands and utilities

To improve theming, ReactOS 0.4.5 adds some major enhancements to the comctl32 and uxtheme components. It also includes some fixes to the Winsock 2 DLL so that apps won't crash so often, and introduces a basic NTLM implementation to the secur32 component.

A bunch of commands and utilities were reworked or improved in this release of ReactOS. For example, the "at" command was implemented and the "tree" command reworked, but the font and even viewers, as well as the scheduler service have been greatly improved. Check the changelog attached below for more details.

Various apps were added into RAPPS, which was finally replaced in ReactOS 0.4.5. Other than that, it looks like support for Asian fonts was implemented into the console properties dialog, and various components updated, including FreeType 2.7.1, zlib 1.2.11, libpng 1.6.28, libjpeg 9b, libtiff 4.0.7, uniata 0.46e3, ACPICA 20170303, mbedTLS 2.4.0, Wine Staging 2.2, and mkisofs schily-2017-02-16.

ReactOS 0.4.5 also includes a handful of improvements to the Win32 subsystem and the shell, improving the Start Menu, the Folder Options dialog, etc. You can download ReactOS 0.4.5 if you want to install the operating system on a new computer, but if you're using ReactOS 0.4.4 or a previous release, you can simply update your installation.

ReactOS 0.4.5 Changelog