Home >ReactOS News >News #28: Mac & Parallels support, new ReactOS Roadmap
2006-12-05, Klemens Friedl
Mac & Parallels support, new ReactOS Roadmap
Intel Mac and Parallels support, new Roadmap and new Interviews
Intel Mac & Parallels support, new ReactOS Roadmap
Intel Mac and Parallels support, new Roadmap, new Interviews and newsletter author request.
ReactOS Intel Mac compatibility
ReactOS development builds (trunk) have run fine now for two days on Intel Mac (with Bootcamp installed) computers. Intel Mac's consist of standard hardware but there are some differences which had made it impossible to run ReactOS before. Intel Mac's don't have PS/2 keyboard controllers. GRUB as well as Darwin's BIOS loader had similar problems sometime ago, good that it has been fixed in ReactOS too. Intel Mac's BIOS has a "serial port" bug, it reports that COM1 exist, but no one is there physically. Two other BIOS bug are related to reading CD/DVD drives. ReactOS does support HID-compliant devices, especially USB keyboard and mouse which is relevant for Intel Mac. We want to thank Michael Steil for making this possible. Stay tuned for ReactOS 0.3.1 which will incorporate these improvements and will be released in late december 2006.
Parallels' virtual machine now supported
In our ReactOS forums, a lot of people asked why ReactOS hadn't worked in Parallels, now ReactOS is known to work fine there. It's possible to install and boot it without problems. Even the network card is recognised by ReactOS's Plug&Play Manager and operate great.
New ReactOS Roadmap
Visitors or the ReactOS website have asked us for several times for a roadmap. Historically, the ReactOS roadmap was always a bit outdated that's why it has been removed some months ago. The roadmap page is now back, with completely rewritten content. Please remember it is still considered in draft state, but we though it is better share the current long term plans with the community. The roadmap may also attract upcoming new developers, if someone would like to work on the ReactOS project in some way, subcribe the related mailing lists and read informations on our website.
A short sum-up of the ReactOS roadmap, for more information visit our ReactOS roadmap page.
Short-term plan
The next release is going to be 0.3.1. ReactOS 0.3.1 will be released somewhen before 31th of December, 2006. A description of improvements will be published soon.
Medium-term plan
The coming 0.4 release series will still stay in alpha stage, and 0.5 release series will be marked as beta, meaning a system which is suitable for every day use.
Long-term plan
N/A at the moment.
New ReactOS Developer Interviews
We have already a neat collection of interviews showcasing the talent of the people behind ReactOS. Interviews are divided into several parts and cover different interesting topics - beginning from how developers got involved in the ReactOS project and going up to which development software they use in their daily work. We are publishing interviews on a weekly basis.
Newsletter author request
We are still searching for a ReactOS Weekly Newsletter author. Some have already replied in our developer mailing list. If you would like to take over that "job" of the newsletter author, please hurry up and write an email to the developer mailing list with some information about you.
