ravynOS 0.4.0pre4

ravynOS Pygmy Marmoset

Developer Preview Release v0.4.0pre4

Welcome to the 0.4.0pre4 Developer Preview of ravynOS as we continue working towards release 0.4! As usual, this is an unstable pre-release of upcoming stuff intended for people helping build the system. It is not complete. It contains bugs - sometimes serious ones - including application and desktop crashes and kernel panics. You have been warned.

This snapshot release includes the start of a GUI based on Cocoa and Mach. It aims to be Mac compatible. The GUI is very rudimentary so far - please be patient! More is on the way.

Detailed release notes below!
TLDR: This release does stuff. More stuff than the previous one, but not by much, and a lot less than we want it to do eventually.

Kernel stabilization

A major bug in mach_msg memory allocation was fixed, massively improving the kernel's stability. There may still be occasional freezes or panics, mainly in the drm-kmod (DRM/KMS video) drivers or in the latest Intel wifi (iwlwifi) driver.

More LaunchDaemons

Launchd now starts the Apple syslog (asld) and auditd services which had been previously disabled for stability issues. The command-line aslutil can be used to examine ASL logs.

WindowServer & SystemUIServer

The Tanuki series releases used a pretty traditional X11/KDE desktop environment that was shoehorned into looking and behaving like the Mac desktop. However, this can only go so far due to the very different architecture and design of the two systems. 0.4.0pre3 had the very first bits of a new UI built ground-up to be what we need. This release adds some vital plumbing and the first version of SystemUIServer.

WindowServer should start automatically if it detects a supported GPU (Intel HD and Iris, AMD or Radeon - we are still working towards virtual machine support with qxl and vmwgfx drivers). If successful, a black and white "ravynOS" wallpaper should appear on all screens and a login window should appear on one of them. Enter "liveuser" as the user name, leave password blank, and click the Login button. If you get it wrong, there is no feedback: just try again. A better login window is in development but we needed something quickly to make the Live ISO work :)

After login, the display should change to a black screen with a menu bar at the top of one screen. The menu bar has a clock and the Ravyn menu, with typical options like About this computer, Recent items, Sleep and Restart. Most of these work - try Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down in particular and please report if they work for your hardware.

When a Cocoa app (e.g. /Applications/Utilities/Install ravynOS.app) is launched, its menus appear in the global bar and can be used as you would expect. Switching applications will switch the active menus as well. Exiting an application removes its menus from the bar. Remaining work items are tracked here. Also beware of known issues #288 and #280 in particular.

Temporary Secret Terminal

Since the desktop has no way yet to launch apps, you can press <Logo>-<Enter> (Logo being your Windows or Command key or its equivalent) to launch a terminal window. Press <Alt>-<Space> while focused for a window menu, then enable Decorations to allow moving or resizing the window. The shell will be running as nobody, so use su - liveuser to get to your regular account. This is not a Cocoa app and has no menus; it will go away once we have something better.

Other Changes

• Many commits from FreeBSD upstream
• Many bugs fixed
• Many new bugs

Limitations and Known Issues

• The GUI is extremely minimal
• Lots of inconsistencies and incompatibilities
• Very few apps available
• Launchd jobs created from LaunchServices are not removed after exiting
• Many open options (e.g. redirecting I/O, setting env vars, wait for exit) are not yet implemented on the launchd version of LaunchServices
• See open issues

Please see the wiki for system requirements, install instructions and where to find things.

Ask questions or give feedback in the Discussions area. Please report any bugs to the Issues tracker. Your help in fixing said bugs would be appreciated too! Thanks!

Get It!

Download 0.4.0pre4 from NomadLogic - US West or your closest mirror:
US Central | US East | US East 2 | Norway | Denmark

Torrents are also available courtesy of FOSSTorrents

Unstable "nightly" builds are also available for developer testing:
Download from US West | US Central | US East | US East 2 | Norway | Denmark

Torrents of the snapshot builds are available too! Thanks to @RangerRick for setting these up.

Acknowledgements

As usual, thank you to our community of sponsors, designers, developers, testers, and users, and mirror hosts for supporting the project.