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ReactOS has released Alpha version 3.8 today of their Windows NT clone operating system.  ReactOS is very different from other operating systems in that their goal is to create a Windows compatible operating system but with entirely original code.

This release is Alpha and as such is not suitible for every day usage but if you want to try it out you can download their Live CD.  This will allow you to boot off of it and use the operating system without making any changes to your own computer.

Changelog:

  • Various bugfixes and enhancements to Kernel core services (e.g. registry, system information routines, sync primitives like guarded mutex, IO support and other)
  • An initiative has been started to fix the remaining unstable parts of the kernel: Memory Manager, caching code and filesystems driver APIs and other dependencies of Mm
  • Introduction of a new Portable Structured Exception Handling mechanism (PSEH 2.0), which is much closer to the native compiler SEH syntax
  • A few longstanding bugs are fixed (such as multipartition HDD support by LiveCD, Task Manager CPU graph)
  • Various GDI drawing problems were fixed
  • A minimal open source version of the KernelDebugger protocol has been implemented, allowing basic MS WinDbg functionality
  • CRT and RTL library improvements
  • A number of problems were fixed in base system drivers: NPFS, CDFS, FASTFAT, FS_REC, SCSIPORT
  • Video driver improvements for better real hardware support
  • Ongoing Win32-subsystem work
  • Continued work on supporting MSVC
  • Build tool chain fixes and improvements (also as part of the MSVC support work)
  • Core tools and components shared with Wine were updated to the latest version

Check It Out> ReactOS via OSNews