ReactOS Newsletter: Volume 3, Issue 27

ReactOS Newsletter - Volume 3, Issue 27 (#27)

Bug Hunt
OLPC

Newsletter Archive

by Z98 on 2007-07-04

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Bug Hunt

The past few weeks have seen quite a lot of activity. At least six major blocker bugs were dealt with, ranging from the network issue to various bugs in the command line console. The pre VMware Workstation 6 Display Driver also now installs and works, which opens up some interesting possibilities. Specifically, on VMware Workstation, the driver allows the use of DirectX or ReactX. Which means Magnus Olsen's work on ReactX can actually be demo'ed on Workstation, to an extent. However, the npfs issue stubbornly remains and will require a lot of work by Aleksey Bragin to fix.

Several other major bugs also surfaced or have been moved up in terms of priority. The first is the Cirrus Logic CL-54xx NT graphics driver failing to work on QEMU. While not a make or break blocker, it would still be nice to get it working before the 0.3.3 release. A more serious issue is the kernel debugging system crashing under certain conditions. If KDBG fails, expect to see a blue screen. Perhaps ironically, after the VMware Display Driver started working, VMware released a new one that fails. Well, not so much as fails as reduces the resolution to 320x240. So now we need to get ReactOS to play nicely with VMware 6. A hardware related issue is SCSI support. In theory, ReactOS supports being installed to SCSI drivers, something people have tested using VMware. This was also broken recently and several developers want to get it fixed before 0.3.3. The last major issue that really needs to be addressed is the Firefox 2 installer. Originally failing due to a problem with richedit, Christoph von Wittich resolved that issue only to have some odd permissions problem pop up. For that matter, the FF2 installer has failed with several rather odd errors.

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OLPC

Some people aren't aware that ReactOS was one of several projects that received hardware to test on from One Laptop Per Child. Aleksey has been playing around with it, slowly coaxing ReactOS to boot. Incidentally, this little side project occupied his attention for a while. Make any inferences you wish from that statement. Anyways, Aleksey managed to get to the point where the INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error popped up, which was pretty much where he had to stop since the OLPC's storage system isn't the one traditionally used by NT systems. While this effort doesn't directly impact ReactOS, it does demonstrate the possibilities. If Microsoft can get Windows to run on the OLPC, than so can we.

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