Reactos

Installation strategy

The first consideration to make is whether to install ReactOS on a dedicated testing machine or in a contained environment, such as running on an emulator without direct disk access. The use of an emulator is preferable if the machine on which you will run ReactOS is your primary computer or if you have important data on the computer which you cannot afford to lose.

If you decide to install ReactOS on a disk drive that contains an existing operating system (such as Microsoft Windows XP), you should ensure that the drive is formatted with a file system ReactOS can access and write to (now, primary FAT32/FAT16 partition) and that there is sufficient free space on the drive such that ReactOS can be installed (now, >=450 MB).
Furthermore, the current hardware limitations to which ReactOS is constrained must be identified and compared to the target computer system (e.g. that ReactOS has only basic audio support as of 0.4.12 release).

Once the available hardware and software situation is determined the installation media can be selected. In most cases, USB-RAM boot should be enough (or CD-ROM boot for virtual machines). But sometimes it may either not work or be not available for the particular system. Then you can use other available options as well.

ReactOS goes through three stages during setup. The first two stages deal with the installation of the system, while the third stage is the first usable boot by the user.

• First stage – Text mode setup, started when booting from a ReactOS CD-ROM.
• Second stage – Booting to GUI installer. The input of user information and registering of files.
• Third stage – Booting to desktop, user configurations.

If you encounter problems, it is recommended to disable all secondary or unnecessary devices, especially USB-cameras and sound cards of any type.

Tester

No operating system is usable if it is found to be unstable and prone to crashes. As ReactOS development work involves studying the behavior of an operating system that is not completely documented, testing is of even greater importance in order to fulfill the objective of binary compatibility with Windows.

You can assist the ReactOS development effort by installing regular nightly (master) builds available here and providing feedback on issues/problems you encountered during and after installing the OS via our bug tracker.
More information regarding debugging is available here and is recommended reading for those who wish to submit a report to our bug tracker.
For this, you need to have basic knowledge in collecting information from a crash like backtraces and crash dumps. Knowledge of using a basic debugger is a plus.

We have several Wiki pages for setting up a debugging environment and building using different compilers too:

• Setting up a Debugging environment
• How to create a JIRA Issue

FAQ

Will I be able to run 32-bit Windows programs on ReactOS for ARM?

On which processors will ReactOS run?

ReactOS currently only supports the x86 processor architecture, although ARM and AMD64 ports are being worked on.
ReactOS will run on processors like Intel(R) Pentium(R) x64, Intel Xeon(R) x64, AMD(R) Athlon(R) x64 and AMD Opteron(R) in 32-bit mode, but the 64-bit functionality of these processors is not complete currently.

• ReactOS currently works on x86 and (partially) on x64 based computers
• ReactOS currently partially boots on ARM, but not much more
• ReactOS will run on x64 based computers, but this port is still under development.
• Someday ReactOS will work on other processors/architectures. But we currently don’t have the manpower to port to 20 different architectures…

Minimum hardware requirements

The minimum requirements to install ReactOS are:

• RAM: at least 64 MB, recommended 256 MB, and even 2048 MB if you want to test large software suites or bundles.
• Processor: x86 or x64 architecture, Pentium or later and compatibles; for more information see ReactOS ports.
• HDD:

  FAT16/FAT32 primary boot partition.

  IDE/SATA with minimum 450 MB of free space on the primary partition (please note that some SATA controllers may not work with ReactOS):

• Video: VGA compatible video card (VESA BIOS version 2.0 or later).

Getting ReactOS

Due to the current state of the project, the ReactOS Foundation does not offer official installation media for distribution. Installation CD-ROMs must be created by the user by writing an available image file to a CD-ROM.

USB Improvements

USB (Universal Serial Bus) is an important standard adopted throughout the industry and used widely on many devices such as external storage, keyboards, mice, and various other devices.
Notably, there are a great number of computers that do not come with a CD-ROM drive these days, with the only option being USB in order to boot or install an operating system.
The USB stack itself is arguably a very complicated one, the code to support it is complex, and maintaining it is not an easy task.
ReactOS currently lags behind an advanced USB implementation as various bugs and regressions still plague the system.
Despite this, many people have worked hard and contributed code to improve USB functionality in ReactOS.

Vadim Galyant and Victor Perevertkin have brought in a new USB stack which provides many fixes as well as improvements to various areas, improving USB support in general.
Although there is a long journey ahead towards an advanced and perfectly functional USB stack within ReactOS, the new module already supports HID and storage devices.

История

Ранняя разработка: от FreeWin95 до ReactOS

В начале 1996 года группа разработчиков свободного программного обеспечения объявила о начале проекта FreeWin95, целью которого была разработка свободного клона системы Windows 95. Проект остановился на дискуссиях об архитектуре системы. К концу 1997 года проект всё ещё не принёс никаких результатов. Чтобы оживить проект, цель изменили на клонирование Windows NT, а новое название придумал Jeff Knox — ReactOS. В феврале 1998 года проект стартовал.

Сейчас

В настоящий момент разработчики трудятся над компонентами системы. В связи с отсутствием спонсора и немногочисленностью команды разработчиков активность проекта невысока.
Несколько раз предпринимались попытки портировать ReactOS на различные архитектуры, но на текущий момент поддерживаются только версии для x86 и x86-64.

Ответвления

С использованием открытости системы, периодически создаются форки на основе ReactOS, которые спустя некоторое время после создания забрасываются.

• Ekush OS (2004)
• ReactOS Server Edition
• ReactOS Server
• OpenROS (2013)
• FusionOS (2013)
• ReactOS NG (2015) — направленный на совместимость с Windows 8
• Greentea OS (2016) — направлен на ускорение/упрощение разработки

ReactOS Community Edition

Новая оболочка ReactOS
В апреле 2014 ReactOS анонсировала Indiegogo кампании по сбору денег для запуска ReactOS Community Edition, данная версия базируется на ReactOS-0.4. Данной кампании надо было собрать 50.000$ для разработки. Предполагалось, что она будет поддерживать приложения и драйвера для многих устройств. 1 июня 2014 завершилась кампания по сбору денег с итогом в 25.141$.

AMD64 (amd64)

Main article: AMD64

AMD64, also known as x86-64 (or simply x64), refers to AMD’s specifications for a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set. The ros-amd64-bringup branch was created on by Timo Kreuzer for porting ReactOS to this architecture and this code was already merged into trunk. Most of the code is shared between amd64 and i386, but some code had to be rewritten.

In late 2017, Timo Kreuzer started to complete the missing pieces and fix the AMD64 build with the goal of making ReactOS x64 able to boot to the desktop. As of 0.4.8, work has not been yet finished. The x64 port builds, but crashes in an early phase of booting.

What Is ReactOS

ReactOS is a free and open-sourced operating system based on the Windows NT architecture, providing support for existing applications and drivers, and an alternative to the current dominant consumer operating system. Compatibility with Microsoft Server 2003 is the ReactOS design goal.

It would be perhaps important to start by saying what ReactOS -isn’t-. It is not another wrapper built on Linux, like WINE. It does not attempt or plan to compete with WINE; in fact, the user-mode part of ReactOS is almost entirely WINE-based and our two teams have cooperated closely in the past. ReactOS is also not «yet another OS». It does not attempt to be a third player, like SkyOS or any other alternative OS out there. People are not meant to uninstall Linux and use ReactOS instead; ReactOS is a replacement for Windows users who want a Windows replacement that behaves just like Windows.

While ReactOS’ source availability and current usage are mostly intended for programmers to expand and improve on, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to use it, and in its final state will be a consumer-friendly OS. If you’ve used Windows before, you’ll find yourself in a familiar environment with ReactOS. The learning curve, if any, should be minimal since ReactOS duplicates many of the Windows graphical environment applets, control panels, and dialogs (Windows 2000/XP/2003).

The current focus is to develop ReactOS to a stage where it is capable of running most Windows drivers and applications «out of the box.» However, this does not mean that ReactOS will stop there. As new features are added to Windows, our developers will strive to incorporate such new features in future versions of ReactOS. Once the compatibility level has been reached, we may even choose to improve ReactOS beyond its Windows roots. These changes would be external from the main OS, and totally compatible with Windows, but they would add an extra advantage. For example, one of our goals is to have built-in POSIX compatibility, much like Windows Services for Unix. It could also be as simple as natively supporting multiple desktops however, instead of requiring a powertoy.

ReactOS is a registered trademark of the ReactOS Foundation.
Windows NT is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Commits

Commits are data added to the ReactOS SVN. The term data is used because it is not limited to code, but may include any other media including icons and sound. If a piece of code is committed then it means that its part of the ReactOS source code. Every commit has its own unique identification number and a message explaining its purpose.

Messages

In an effort to lessen the load when changelogs need to be written for releases, this is the proposed commit message format. The general idea is that a script can be run from one SVN revision to another and populate the changelog by putting all commits for one component into a single category. To do this, a commit needs to identify which component(s) it is for.

An example of this would be the following (commit by Johannes Anderwald, ):

Notifications

When commits are made, it makes notifications is several ways.

• The RosKGB IRC bot in #reactos notifies the room of the event

Installing the system to a USB-drive

Windows

1. Run Rufus (give admin rights if asked), and setup like this:
   1. Select your USB drive from the Device drop-down menu
   2. Select «Create a bootable startup disk using»
   3. Choose «ISO Image» from that drop down menu
   4. Click the disk icon next to that drop down menu, and select the .ISO file
   5. (Optional) tweak the other Rufus settings – ONLY if you know what you’re doing
2. Click «Start» in Rufus. Acknowledge that this operating will erase everything currently on your USB drive. Wait a few moments while Rufus does its magic.
3. Try to boot. (Please do not use a computer where you store important data in order to avoid data loss!)

Linux

1. Optional step: backup your data from the USB stick.
2. Run woeusbgui from application menu or terminal. Note: it need privileges to make work.
   1. Choose Source: From disk image (iso). Then browse to image downloaded before.
   2. Select target device. If it is not appear check if flash drive is connected and press Refresh button.
   3. Press Install and wait a while.
3. Mount the flash drive.
4. Edit a configuration file grub2/grub.cfg according to Boot FreeLoader from GRUB manual. The example of configuration file:

menuentry "ReactOS" {
   set root=(hd0,1)
   chainloader +1
   parttool (hd0,1) boot+
   multiboot /loader/freeldr.sys
}

Your bootable USB stick is now ready. Unmount it and try to boot.

Commands

After you have started a Build Environment Command Prompt, there are certain commands available.

Invoking a build

or

This command builds all binaries of ReactOS. They will be placed in the created output directory created by the configure command. (default: output-MinGW-i386/reactos)
All source files, which did not change since the last build, will not be built again.

This command works like make, but also generates a bootable ReactOS ISO file (bootcd.iso) placed into the output directory.
It is wise to tag your Boot-CDs with the revision they were built from if you need to keep many ReactOS ISOs.

This command generates livecd.iso in the output directory. This is the ReactOS Live-CD that runs completely from the CD-ROM.

This command generates hybridcd.iso in the output directotry. This is a hybrid cd of ReactOS

Перезагрузка реактора

Аварийное восстановление реактора

Другая серьезная проблема ReactOS — менеджер памяти. Его постоянно пробивает на ностальгию. Он пытается обратиться по адресам из старой таблицы и навевает воспоминания о раннем знакомстве с XP. Помнишь бесконечно сыплющиеся сообщения «The memory could not be „read“»? В ReactOS они появляются регулярно, как и всевозможные software exception.

Ошибки управления памятью

В итоге после очередной ошибки система зависает наглухо, а при перезагрузке становится синей, как утопленник.

Белый, синий… не хватает красного!

Единственный способ снова поднять ReactOS — это восстановить предыдущее состояние из образа. Благо VirtualBox быстро делает снапшоты.

Следующая проблема (если ты сумеешь до нее дойти) — это драйверы.

Оборудование установить, не?

Черт бы с ней, со звуковухой! Без веб-камеры, тачпада и расширенных функций клавиатуры тоже можно обойтись. Интернет-то где? Нам пришлось перепробовать разные сетевые адаптеры (реальные и эмулируемые), прежде чем ReactOS смогла заработать хоть с каким-то. Им оказался древнейший адаптер на 10 Мбит/с.

10 Мбит/с хватит всем!

Беспроводные модули ReactOS не видела в упор. Когда мы подключали диск с драйверами, на нем были все пункты, кроме «установить». Он просто исчезал из меню, так как мастер установки не мог выполнить проверку соответствия ОС. Да, есть проктологические способы сделать это. Выдрать файлы драйверов, руками распихать их в нужные каталоги… даже реестр можно править руками. Вот только для чего тогда еще в прошлом веке создавали plug-n-play?

Вариант 1. Присоединись к сообществу «Xakep.ru», чтобы читать все материалы на сайте

Членство в сообществе в течение указанного срока откроет тебе доступ ко ВСЕМ материалам «Хакера», увеличит личную накопительную скидку и позволит накапливать профессиональный рейтинг Xakep Score!
Подробнее

Вариант 2. Открой один материал

Заинтересовала статья, но нет возможности стать членом клуба «Xakep.ru»? Тогда этот вариант для тебя!
Обрати внимание: этот способ подходит только для статей, опубликованных более двух месяцев назад.

Я уже участник «Xakep.ru»

Introduction

KDB, the Kernel DeBugger of ReactOS, is built into ntoskrnl. For each exception which is handled by the kernel, KDB gets up to two chances to handle it. The first chance occurs before the kernel tries to find and execute an exception handler. The last chance occurs after the kernel fails to find an exception handler or the handler did not handle the exception.

For each type of exception known by KDB, you can set the condition when KDB should be entered individually for first and last chance. The possible settings for the conditions are never, umode, kmode and always. never means that KDB will never be entered when the exception is raised, umode means that it will be entered when the exception was raised in user mode, kmode means to enter KDB when the exception was raised in kernel mode, and always means to always enter KDB.

Enabling KDBG before build

KDBG is automatically enabled or disabled by the configuration options script (cmake/config.cmake).

KDBG is by default configured to be enabled for the bootloader entries «ReactOS (Debug)» and «ReactOS (RosDbg)» for all ISO images. See also .

KDBinit

As soon as possible KDB loads and interprets the KDBinit file (\SystemRoot\system32\drivers\etc\KDBinit)

The KDBinit file can contain all commands available in the command line interface of KDB plus the break command. When a break is read from the KDBinit file KDB is entered – you can use this to automatically enter KDB when booting.

Here’s the default KDBinit file (the break is commented out):

# Example KDBinit file
#

# Set the disassembly flavor to "intel" (default is "at&t")
set syntax intel

# Change the condition to enter KDB on INT3 to "always" (default is "kmode")
#set condition INT3 first always

# This is a special command available only in the KDBinit file - it breaks into
# KDB when it is interpreting the init file at startup.
#break

New [Section] Fields

There are two experimental fields in the database files — Languages and LicenseInfo.

Languages

This field is used to inform the user whether the app is available in their language.

You should place all the language codes app supports separated by there. Multiline parameters are also supported.

Example:

Languages=0C09|0813|0422 \\English|Dutch|Ukrainian

LicenseInfo

This is a field in the DB which, when present, changes the way License field in the info is shown.

Application license types correspond to a number:

• 1 — «Open Source»
• 2 — «Freeware»
• 3 — «Demo/Trial».

RAPPS GSoC 2017 Final Report

About

The Foundation as a whole existed in two tiers, with the administrative body based in Russia and regional branches that handled donations in their respective regions. This structure existed because of the differences in how laws deal with transfering money to Russia from Europe and the Americas. All branches and the administrative body were registered as non-profits in their respective regions.

The ReactOS Foundation was established on June 5, 2002 and was based in Saransk, Russia. It was registered as a non-profit organization under Russian Federal law. The Foundation operated under the guidelines of the ReactOS Foundation By-laws and served as the primary support body for the Project, assisting in the development of ReactOS and various subprojects within its purview. Additionally, management of trademarks, funding, and other legal matters were handled by the Foundation.

Programming

Before you can begin programming an operating system, you need to know how to program. The following are references and tutorials that one can use to learn various principles. As ReactOS primarily uses C, C++, and Assembly, we will only cover those in this section. The Assembly languages we will cover will be for Intel/AMD and PowerPC, as those are the only architectures ReactOS has code for. For C# and .NET related matters, scroll downwards. Each reference will be ranked as Introductory, Intermediate, or Advanced. Introductory assumes no knowledge of programming, Intermediate assumes you know how to use the language in question, and Advanced covers some of the more tricky topics in programming. Some may be more than one and a rare few will cover topics from all three.

Online

Description	Website	Level
A general C++ tutorial that covers the first basic program to more advanced topics like templates.	Introductory / Intermediate
This tutorial is huge. It covers a large range of topics in C programming and focuses a lot on its use on UNIX platforms. However, in doing so, it also teaches you a lot about what C is capable of and how it’s used in an operating system.	Introductory / Intermediate / Advanced
Pointers are some of the trickiest things to work with in C/C++. This tutorial provides examples of various techniques that take advantage of them.	Intermediate / Advanced
A very nice reference to the C and C++ Standard Libraries. In order to do anything substantial or even trivial, you’re likely to be using things from the Standard Libraries.	Intermediate / Advanced
An introduction to IBM’s PowerPC. If you’ve never seen assembly code before, I’d advise you start with learning the assembly for a RISC architecture like the PPC. Good PPC tutorials can actually be hard to come by, but these should get you started.	Intermediate
Intermediate
Intermediate
These two are guides to Intel’s assembly language. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, but they seem to complement each other well.	Intermediate
Intermediate
Registers on Intel’s architecture have a somewhat contrived naming convention compared to RISC architectures. These two references provide a breakdown of what they are and how they’re used.	Intermediate
Intermediate
How C/C++ code is transformed into assembly is also rather interesting. Function conventions define how a function is transformed into assembly code.	Advanced
Advanced
Intel also maintains a series of books on assembly programming. These things are fairly hefty and you’ll want to be familiar with the basics of the x86 architecture before tackling them.	Advanced
AMD also has a list of manuals for programming on its AMD64 architecture.
A fairly verbose win32 tutorial. While not nearly as indepth as Petzold’s book, this does cover a fair amount of material and is a great place to start learning the Windows API.	Intermediate
SEH is how exceptions are handled in Windows. If you want to do system programming, you’re going to need to learn it.	Advanced
Some aspects of Windows use the Component Object Model extensively and a tutorial to to writing them in 7 parts is on CodeProject.	Intermediate / Advanced

See also

External Documentation Links

Description	Name / ISBN	Level
The book for the Windows API. ReactOS uses the win32 API extensively for any of its own graphical applications as well as support the various win32 applications written by third parties.	Programming Windows, 5th Edition ISBN 1-57231-995-X	Intermediate / Advanced
The book for using the Microsoft Foundation Classes. While ReactOS does not support MFC, we could potentially do so in the future if someone were to implement it. Of course, one would have to be thoroughly familiar with MFC to do so.	Programming Windows with MFC ISBN 1-57231-695-0	Intermediate / Advanced

Stuff not on the Downloader list

Software/Stage	Installation	Application	Comments
Adobe Flash Player 10.0.12.36 (non-IE)
Adobe Flash Player 10.2.152.26 (non-IE)
Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.261 ESR (non-IE)
Works	Works	marcolombardi: there aren’t bugs! It works, and i can open pdf (tested with 0.4RC1)
Works	Works	Black_Fox: installs and runs fine.
Failed	Works
Apache OpenOffice 2.4.3
Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1
Apache OpenOffice 4.0.1
Works	Failed	negativespace: Tested in a VirtualBox VM. Throws a C++ runtime error on startup, then a «failed to initiate properly» error, before terminating the program entirely.
Works	Works	Installs fine. Runs fine. No noticeable issues other than some visual distortion when using the «Analyze» and «Run Cleaner» processes. Still completely usable though.
Diablo 1 Retail	Works	Works
Works	Works	Vort: Succesfully downloaded file from iso.reactos.org. Minor bug: can’t close program with Alt+F4, File->Exit works fine.
Works	Works
Works	Works	reactosfanboy: installs & runs fine, plays ros start sound
Works	Works	reactosfanboy: GIMP 2.6.12 installs & runs great out of the box, recent versions are totally broken, we should downgrade rapps version
Failed	Not tested	nzeemin: Installer failed: «Unable to connect to the Internet. If you use a firewall, please whitelist GoogleUpdate.exe.»
Failed	Failed	reactosfanboy: installer from link starts erroneously via NTVDM, just creates cmos dump, then ends, most chrome versions do not even install correctly. Some Chrome v5-v6 can install and even render the GUI correctly, but can not show any webpages
N/A (Archive File)
N/A (Archive File)
Works	Works	Vort: Opened ReactOS_logo.svg without a problems.
Works	Failed	nitesico: for me java 7u51 works (setup). I test Minecraft Launcher and it works but there are some bugs of OpenGL.. when there is the splash screen of minecraft, ReactOS crashes… EDIT: There is a big bug, after install java and restart the system, ReactOS can’t find Java and launcher says: «This application requires a Java Runtime Environment 1.7»
N/A (Archive File)
LibreOffice 3.4.0 (build12)
LibreOffice 5.0.3.2	Works	Run w/o result	Black_Fox: Takes several minutes to start up. Then it takes tens of seconds for the first text to appear. Doing anything will probably crash the app.
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2000
Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003
Failed	Not tested
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.20	Works	Works
Mozilla Firefox 3.0.19
Mozilla Firefox 43.0.1 (=>4)	Works	Works	Installed without problem, went to Youtube and had a random video playing with ads overlays. I then updated to 43.0.4, worked after a reboot.
Failed	Works
Works	Works	reactosfanboy: works good, minor: fonts are a bit ugly
N/A (Archive File)
Works	Works	Black_Fox: works fine, including maximization.
Works	Works	reactosfanboy: installs & runs & leeches fine (maybe you should limit simultaneous connections (e.g.: 5peers/torrent,10maxConections), tested again with 700MB debian image
Works	Works
Works	Works
Works	Works
Failed	Not tested	Nemerian: Installer works until the actual installation segment, then it just stops.
Works	Works	fastcom: Works good,installs fine.

General

Why only C and assembly?

The reasoning is actually because of the tools we use. GCC’s C++ compiler is less than stellar so we limit things to C and assembly to make our lives easier.

How do I get ReactOS’ source code and build it?

This information is covered on this page: Build Environment

The recommended build environment is RosBE. It’s designed to run on Windows and *nix, though the *nix version may not be as up to date as the Windows version.

Will drivers designed for Windows work on ReactOS?

Some drivers have been known to work, but at this point, there is no definitive answer as some facilities in kernel land are still unimplemented.

What about the so-called SEH-problem?

Structured exception handling (SEH) is used in programming ReactOS as it is used in programming for OS/2 or Microsoft(R) Windows(R) NT. SEH is a game that is played between the OS and compiler (Keywords: __try, __except, __finally). ReactOS itself is SEH-aware and provides the infrastructure. However, up till now, the GNU-compiler used is not capable of generating SEH-aware code. So one can’t compile a driver or program which uses SEH with the GNU-Compiler.

Creating the Installation CD

The downloaded file is a compressed archive in ZIP format, containing a single file named «ReactOS.iso». The ISO image contains everything needed to create the CD.

• Extract the image file from the archive into a temporary directory.
• Burn the ISO image to a CD-R or CD-RW using any software of your choice.

When burning the ISO to disc, be sure it is written as an image file. Writing to the disc as another type of data will not work and render the Installation CD unbootable. Look for an option similar to «Burn from ISO» or «Write disk image».

Installing ReactOS

Please consider making full backups of any sensitive data before you start any experiments with ReactOS in the production environment!

[Section]

This is the beginning of the area that is read when the user clicks on the name of the program that he chooses to download. It consists of several things:

Description

The description of the program For example : «A program that emulates older hardware to run older games».

Size of the program. Template: NUMBERUNIT For example «223 MB».

SizeBytes

The actual size of the download in bytes. Used to display size value in the application info as well as while downloading.

Category

The category of the program. Category name corresponds to the number. There are 15 categories for now:

• 1 – Sound – Software for recording, playing, modify, convert sound
• 2 – Video – As above but applies to video and movies
• 3 – Graphics – As above, but graphics and images
• 4 – Games and Entertainment – There are games, emulators for games
• 5 – Internet and Networks – Browsers, IM clients, FTP software, Remote desktop…
• 6 – Office stuff – Software that is used in the Office, for example, Open Office
• 7 – Development/programming – programs used for compiling, and source writing, for example, Dev C++
• 8 – Education – Programs that help in teaching, learning. For example dictionaries, translators
• 9 – Engineering – Programs similar to CAD, SolidWorks (TM)
• 10 – Financial – Programs for financial stuff, TRade monitors, database systems for warehouses e.t.c
• 11 – Science – For programs that make simulations, helps in the Chemistry, Physics…
• 12 – Tools – Utilities for users, for example, archiving software
• 13 – Drivers – Files for the devices that are installed in the system
• 14 – Libraries – Files that are needed to run some programs like Visual Basic and .NET
• 15 – Themes — Themes for ReactOS or Windows (for example: watercolor, classic, luna, etc)
• 16 – Other – programs that did not fit in above categories

Explorer File Search Bring-Up

The graphical shell (aka Explorer) is a vital component that allows the user to interact with the system.
The shell itself, though, lacks a lot of stuff which deeply limits the overall ability for the user to interact with the system in an easy and flexible way.
However, with work done during the Google Summer of Code 2019, the shell has seen a new feature implemented — file search.
Thanks to student Brock Mammen, this feature will help the user find the exact location of a file without the hassle of having to search for content manually or to rely on third-party programs.
The screenshot below demonstrates the search feature in action:

Secure

Despite statements to the contrary, Windows NT is secure by design. It was the first mainstream operating system with a proper implementation of a very flexible security model based on access control lists.

Recent NT-based operating systems from Redmond, especially XP, got a bad reputation for their weak default security settings. To be fair, these defaults were chosen to simplify the transition from Win9x for both users and legacy applications. This decision alone invalidated many of the NT security features. ReactOS will incorporate proper default security settings.

ReactOS has been designed for high security; it doesn’t share some of the common security flaws with other operating systems.

Obviously, more widespread systems with a large user base are more likely to be attacked by bad software writers than minor systems like Macintosh and Linux.

New themes

ReactOS first gained theming support in the 0.3.x era, with the Lautus theme being the standard bundled to demonstrate the feature. With 0.4.12, the team is pleased to announce two new themes to add to its stable. The first is Lunar, created by Joann Mõndresku and Adam Slabon and designed to be reminiscent of the look and feel of XP while colored in the ReactOS style. The second is Mizu by Foxlet, which seeks to provide a flatter design that draws from the more modern design styles found in newer versions of Windows. A comparison of the two can be found below. Choice is always good, after all, and now users have more of them to find one that better suits their aesthetic tastes.