Unofficial ReactOS Blog

Friday, December 30, 2005

Finding ReactOS's Version

Someone the other day was asking on the ReactOS forums if it was possible to detect wether their application was running on ReactOS. While they wanted to use this to detect ReactOS for using work arounds and not stopping the application running altogether, it is still a bad idea. If you find a bug filing it on Bugzilla will get the problem fixed as soon as possible.

Never the less I was still rather interested to see if this was possible. Then GvG later replied with some information on how you could find out the needed information. So I decided to knock up a little test application to try it myself.

Heres the source:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <tchar.h>
#include <windows.h>

int main()
{
OSVERSIONINFO VersionInfo;
LPTSTR RosVersion;

VersionInfo.dwOSVersionInfoSize = sizeof(OSVERSIONINFO);
ZeroMemory(VersionInfo.szCSDVersion,
sizeof(VersionInfo.szCSDVersion));

if (GetVersionEx(&VersionInfo) != 0)
{
RosVersion = VersionInfo.szCSDVersion +
_tcslen(VersionInfo.szCSDVersion) + 1;

printf("Windows v%i.%i %s\n", VersionInfo.dwMajorVersion,
VersionInfo.dwMinorVersion,
VersionInfo.szCSDVersion);

if (_tcsnicmp(RosVersion, _T("ReactOS"), 7) == 0)
{
printf("%s\n", RosVersion);
}
else
{
printf("Not Running on ReactOS!\n");
}
}

system("PAUSE");
exit(0);
}
This was compiled with Dev-Cpp/mingw, and is release under the GNU GPL Licence

Background Mashup

I was checking out the background section on Frik's site today and i came across a ReactOS logo id never seen before by Stefan Zehe. I liked the basic design of the logo, so i figured id take that and add it to an atom image i'd seen on Dominik's wiki page.

Here's what i came up with:







Update: Added 3 variations of the white background at 1152x864:


All these backgrounds are released under the LGPL Licence

Thursday, December 29, 2005

OpenTTD Multiplayer Status

Ive been wondering if OpenTTD's multiplayer support would work in ROS for a while now, so i decided to finally give it a try.

Initially i got a lot of version missmatch errors from every server i tried (there are a few other bugs in the server browser). I gave up for a while, did a few reinstalls and thought i might try it again. To my supprise this time it worked and without any version missmatch errors. Since OpenTTD is fully playable in ReactOS already and i was connected for a good 10 mins to this server, it wouldnt supprise me if you could actually finish a proper network game.



and some more good news, Jaix Bly has managed to get TinyWeb (Web Server) running in ReactOS and it seems pretty stable. The server had a few hundred hits in a short period of time and it was still running, which is a good sign of things to come :).

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

ReactOS 0.2.9 Roundup

Seeings this blog was started after the Official release of ReactOS v0.2.9 (2005-12-23), I thought id do a little post-release news roundup for it.

Quite a few places reported on the release, and by the looks of the official forums alot of people tried it compared to previous releases. Im sure this was helped by the fact that Firefox now installs and runs.

Better USB Support on the Way ?

Looks like it could be just a matter of weeks before we see some very much improved USB support. Fireball is currently merging Linux's v2.6.14.3 USB stack with the old v2.5 one that is currently being used. This should allow USB sticks (and other things) to function once a driver has been created.

Give Freeloader an NTLDR Look

As of r20366 it is now possible to give Freeloader the same look and feel as NTLDR. Also now by default the background colour has been changed to black to fit with the post NT4 era (previously it was blue).

To theme Freeloader to look like NTLDR open up freeldr.ini (normally located in C:\) and replace the [Display] section with:

[Display]
ShowTime=No
MinimalUI=Yes
MenuBox=No
CenterMenu=No
TimeText=Seconds until highlighted choice will be started automatically:
MenuTextColor=Gray
MenuColor=Black
TextColor=Gray
SelectedTextColor=Black
SelectedColor=Gray

Note: there are 3 spaces after the TimeText string, if you dont include them in freeldr.ini the seconds will be offset 3 places to far to the left.

Current SVN Trunk Issues (r20388)

As of r20364 something to do with resource loading has been broken. The second stage installer and LiveCD will both crash after you move the mouse for the first time. Dialogs will also have the ReactOS default icons in the title bar. The last known working revision is 20363.

Welcome to the Unofficial ReactOS Blog.

ReactOS is designed to be a free (open source) reimplementation of Microsoft Windows NT (4, 2000, XP, etc.).

I will be writing about everything to do with ReactOS on this blog, rather than just development issues that the official blog does.