Community > ReactOS Newsletter Archive > ReactOS Newsletter: Newsletter 39

Newsletter 39

by Z98 on 2008-03-31

General Status

We're currently in the middle of compiling the changelog, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're ready for release.

The keyboard/mouse problem has slowly been worked out and according to Colin Finck it is now fixed. If you still encounter problems, complain to him, not me.  The issue with the keyboard not responding during language selection should now be gone and was due to the keyboard driver not loading properly.

Another recent problem was a pool memory corruption (redzone mismatches). This one actually disrupted testing and development by several developers, but it looks to have been fixed.

Server Move

The server move was quite disruptive, as the DNS and other matters weren't fully resolved for several weeks. Testers were cut off from the SVN builds randomly, as both GetBuilds and the direct link to the downloads didn't work reliably. These have been fixed now. There were also problems with the CMS involving new pages. The last newsletter was missing some metadata that was supposed to be autogenerated, so it was stuck unpublished even though it was finished. Klemens eventually rectified that problem.

Ext2 Driver

We've had a working ext2 driver sitting in SVN for quite some time. Now this doesn't mean it works in ROS. This driver was originally developed by Manoj Paul Joseph before a few ROS developers took it and did some work on it, with testing on Windows XP. In the past, it was known to work reliably on reading and writing from ext2 partitions. No one's entirely sure of its current status, but there's talk of releasing an installer for it for people to test on XP. Regardless of whether the driver works on ROS, it would be extremely useful to have a fully working ext2 driver for Windows, which can then be updated for ext3 and eventually ext4. At the momet, this is stalled by problems of finding a decent installer system. WiX, the preferred option, is currently giving us problems with services. NSIS has already been rejected, mainly because the people trying to get an installer for the driver don't want to use it.

UNIATA

The Universal ATA driver was merged in a while ago and the developers have been working on integrating it into ReactOS. This driver in theory will allow ReactOS to support SATA but no one has tested this to my knowledge. One thing UniATA has resolved is the 8GB limit . Previously, the old driver could only see up to 8GB, even on much larger harddrives. That is an obscenely low number, so integration of UniATA is very important. The UniATA driver isn't turned on by default, so to test it one will need to edit the bootcd and rename uniata.sys to atapi.sys.