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> Open source is supposed to be cross platform...

Says who? There are a lot of open-source projects that are platform specific. Sometimes that's what you need.

For example, most of the Free / Open Source software that I write these days is for a single platform that isn't Linux. :-)

There are some 3D games that run on Linux.

I'm going to mention one that I play myself, Urban Terror (a semi-realistic shooter based on Quake 3).

Sure, it's a few years old. I don't care, it's still just as fun. Occasionally I'll even play some good old "regular" Quake 3.

To be perfectly honest, I don't run UrT or Q3 on Linux myself, I run Mac OS X. The point is, if I ever decided to switch away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu, almost all the games I have on my computer right now would run on Linux as well. Actually, let me go through my Applications folder right now:

• Bridge Construction Set -- yes, it runs on Linux
• DEFCON -- yup. That too.
• Kill Monty -- unfortunately, no. :-( (Then again, that doesn't run on Windows either.)
• Frets On Fire -- yup. It runs on Linux. And way better than on OS X too.
• OpenTTD -- yep. It runs on Linux too.
• IOQuake3 -- sure.
• SNES9x (and by extention, a collection of Super Nintendo games), sure, works on Linux
• Tetrinet Aqua does not run on Linux, but other (and better) Tetrinet clients do.
• The Ur-Quan Masters runs on Linux.
• Uplink runs on Linux.
• And finally, as discussed before, Urban Terror runs on Linux.

So, all the games I actually have on my hard drive and play would run on Linux if I decided to migrate. Except for Kill Monty. (But then again, that doesn't run on Windows either.)

The lack of games are not what's keeping me on Mac OS X on my machine.

Oh, and in response to your issue about not being able to flash because you'd need either Windows or DOS -- I give you FreeDOS.

Or just use FreeDOS.

While I'm not 100% with the FSF on the "open source" vs "Free software" terminology, I do think "open source" is overused and often misapplied. I said something similar to this when I criticized OpenDOS for not really being "open". They had made the source code available - to view only, you couldn't do anything with it. So they called it "open source" and "free", even though it wasn't really either. That was years ago. They've since changed back to proprietary, which (at least) is more honest.

I'll take partial credit for that. You are welcome.

:-)

I can't believe nobody's mentioned FreeDOS

You're lazy, aren't you? He gave the name of one product in his comment. A Google would have given you what you need. DOSBox

Now, I'll simply add: FreeDOS, which is really really really good. Better than any PC-DOS or MS-DOS I've ever used. Either run it native on an older machine, or dump it in a virtual machine. Oh, yes, I guess you want a link for that too: VMWare.

Not CP/M, but FreeDOS is pretty cool. According to wikipedia, CP/M is open source, so perhaps what you seek may exist.

It already exists!

I'll insert my knowledge from when I claimed "FreeDOS" as a trademark in 2001. (Although I now believe there is no difference between "typed drawing" of "FreeDOS" and "FREEDOS" in this context.)

I had once considered applying for a registered trademark, which is ® not TM, but the issue is tricky. I think I have come to a reasonable understanding of trademarks in the US. First of all, to apply for a registered trademark (®) in the US, you need to pay a fee to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Even the small entity fee for basic filing is pretty expensive.

Also, there is the issue of diligence ... if the mark holder fails to prosecute or take action, the mark can be found in a court to be unprotected and open for use. There are other ways to lose a mark, as well.

There are several ways to dispute use of a trademark by a third party. Depending on the situation, the Trademark Office may not be the proper forum. For a real trademark fight, you would need an attorney, preferably one specializing in trademark law. And since inaction would imply that you are giving up the right on the trademark, time to get that lawyer can be of the essence.

However, it is not necessary to register a mark with the USPTO order to claim it as a trademark. From the USPTO: "Any time you claim rights in a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim, regardless of whether you have filed an application with the USPTO."

Federal registration is not required to establish rights in a trademark. Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark. Generally, the first to either use a mark in commerce or file an intent to use application with the Patent and Trademark Office has the ultimate right to use an registration.

The other guy is probably doing this because he believes it is what he has to do to protect his trademark. But I don't know that there's a trademark to be protected, since there's nothing really behind it. IANAL, but if he's just using the domain name to run a link farm, and isn't actually doing anything with the name "simpledog" (he has no content on his site ... every link that looks like it would have content just serves up ads from EBay and the like) then I doubt he has much ground to stand on.

Asking him for his USPTO registration number (as other posters have advised) isn't a good way to ensure if he has the right of trademark, since you don't need to register to use "TM". However, you can respond by asking for demonstrable proof for how he has used "simpledog" in a commerce-related activity related to an actual product. You can back yourself by stating in your written response that you do not consider a link farm with no original content to be an actual product (this will make it harder for him to get a lawyer involved, I think.)

Don't roll over on this. If you do, then you'll demonstrate by inaction that he holds the trademark on "simpledog" and he may further pester you by demanding you turn over your domain to him. If he gets a lawyer involved and that lawyer sends a Cease and Desist letter, then you'll have to make a decision if you want to fight by hiring your own lawyer. Or maybe you'll make an announcement on your web site at that time, that you're shutting down the site for an unrelated reason (no time to admin it, etc.)

But honestly, I suspect that this guy won't bother you after you send back your "no thanks" response.

If you want an editor that supports Esperanto, then you should switch to FreeDOS EDLIN 2.10c, as Esperanto support was already added. :-)

Bah! Look at FreeDOS! Even at the DOS level, OSS kicks the crap outta M$!

My AMD 64 3800+ has FreeDOS on the 2nd partition of my 1st hard drive. It is formatted as a FAT-16 partition. It is one of the choices on the GRUB boot menu. I only boot up DOS every once in a while, but it does run on my AMD 64 computer. About a year ago or so ago I had IBM PC DOS 2000 installed on the 1st partion which also ran well. I later reformatted that partition as NTFS and installed Windows 2000 on my first partition instead. I still have FreeDOS on the 2nd partition. I have Slackware Linux installed on my 3rd partition and in that case I have 32-bit version of Linux running on a 64-bit computer. On a logical partition I have the AMD-64 version of Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Linux which is what I like best and use most of the time.

An easier way to run an old DOS program under Linux or Windows would be to just use the free DOSBox program. In the past, I also used VMWare and had PC DOS 2000 installed on one the the virtual machines. With VMWare I was able to run Linux, Windows and DOS all at once.

Hi. I think you are trolling, but I'm responding anyway.

Also, the analog nub on the PSP freaking sucks. I'm glad there's only one, because the one that's there isn't very sensitive at all. You try making a circular motion with it sometime - it doesn't work. There are two speeds possible with it (all the way out and part of the way out), and the angular refinement is pretty shoddy. It's very hard to go from, for example, W to WNW to NW. You'll generally skip straight over WNW. Ever try web-browsing on the thing?

I own a PSP, and think the analog stick/nub works just fine. I'm not convinced that you've used the PSP first-hand - I don't have a problem moving the nub from, as you say, W to WNW to NW. The analog nub gives me enough fine control in 'GTA: Liberty City Stories' to weave my car through traffic jams at speed. Likewise, I can make distant headshots in 'Star Wars: Battlefront II', which isn't exactly easy. Platforming in 'Daxter' works great.

Sure, you need to get used to the analog nub, but it's basically a new controller so you would expect that. At least, I did.

And yeah, I do use the PSP for web browsing. I do it every day. I have bookmarks to visit my local weather, view the mobile version of slashdot, read the news, keep up with my favorite project, etc. I also visit graphics-heavy sites on the PSP, but tend to avoid it because the screen size makes sites that use lots of graphics difficult to read. But IMDB, Wikipedia, and other "average" sites work just fine. When I'm not playing games on the PSP, I'll usually keep it near the TV so my wife & I can look up things in IMDB ("Who is that actor/actress? Looks familiar."), So, what's wrong with the PSP browser?

Hey guys, check this out! Amiga OS 4 may have just come out but I have found out something even faster. DOS!!! If it crashes, it only takes two seconds to reboot and you have no distractions at all. Remember the good old days you guys when nobody cared about graphics. You can even get all of your word processing done on edlin (the superior wrod processing environment) and all you have to do to print it is just crack out that old edlin manual, figure out how to save the file, then exit and just type PRINT . You don't have to worry about viruses because they don't make any for DOS anymore and all of the DOS viruses came on floppies and if you put it on that new AMD64 machine, chances are, you won't have to worry about viruses because you won't have a floppy drive!!!!! Isn't it exciting! They just came out with a new version not that long ago themselves. Download it here http://freedos.org/. It's great because you don't have to have an emulator. Get it NOW!!!!!

There is a patch available at Here

It also fixes lots of other problems with DOS that people have struggled with.

Yes, DOS is still useable and in use today by lots of important devices.

"You might as well get excited because some one was bringing back DOS."

http://www.freedos.org/

One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware.

Some people HAVE to use old windows, because the old proprietary controlling software that came with a given hardware (say a robot in bio-medical lab), only runs on old OS (I've even seen spectro-photo-meters that only run on DOS. Yeah. Thank goodness FreeDOS is our friend in such deprecated cases). The company has dropped support for newer OS for this peice of hardwre and is only doing hardware repairs. You either have to keep a deprecated OS for your machine, or you have to buy a newer model (Which most of the time is out-of-question because the prices are horribly expensive and the older one still does its job).

The good thing with open source software is, compared to proprietary software like IE7, is that users aren't necessarily stuck with this "won't support anymore situation".
In the IE7 world, whatever Microsoft decides, you'll have to accept it. They decide to drop support for everything before WinXP ? Upgrade to a newer more expensive software is your only hope.
In the opensource world, if there's a big enough userbase (and there is surely a big enough userbase in the scientific community), some users will start tweaking and hacking. As the source is open, nothing stops programmers to start a new separate fork that will support a separate platform that won't be supported anymore in the main line.

Once FireFox 3.0 official is out, be sure that you'll see separate Win9x branches : either FF3.0 with a patched Cairo support. Or FF3.0 with a retro-fitted (non cairo-based) Gecko 1.8 engine. Or a separate continued 2.0 branch that is kept up to date and security-patched for users who can't use FF3.0. Or a completly different Gecko-based browser specially tailored for Win9x users (K-maleon 9x ?)

The only drawback is that, because of registered Mozilla Foundation's trademarks, they'll surely have to call it IceWeasel. Or SnowCat. Or FrostBear. Or LavaBadger. Or whatever else.

Novell was a very proprietary company which improved their products v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y ('80s through mid '90s) so SCO a group of engineers and execs left Novell and begat Caldera. Caldera bought DR-DOS after the Windows incompatibility fiasco (deliberate sabotage by Microsoft), declared that "OSes want to be free" and opened up their DOS source for all to see. Caldera begat Free DOS, and it was good.

Caldera acquired "Novell DOS", after Novell bought Digital Research (and thus DR-DOS). Caldera begat OpenDOS. Pat Villani begat http://www.freedos.org/. Two separate implementations of a Microsoft DOS compatible operating system. And Caldera only opened up some of their DOS code (the kernel, basic drivers and command-line interpreter, if I recall correctly... I'd have to dig out my OpenDOS disc to be 100% certain).

Caldera looked upon the Free DOS and their gaining a decent following, and declared that open source looked promising, so they introduced a Linux distribution that was a bit ahead of its time. They looked upon their package management and update download-equipped open-source Linux operating system and saw that it was good.

In truth, Caldera hopped on the open source bandwagon, made great promises of giving the OS community a time-tested implementation of MS-DOS, then quietly faded into obscurity after releasing a little bit of code. I have their Linux distribution on disc somewhere here, too, but it didn't catch my eye well enough to make me want to switch from Slackware, so I don't really remember it as being anything special.

What Wikipedia says about DR-DOS : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS.
Turns out someone's still working on it, as well : http://www.drdosprojects.de/
And finally, Wikipedia's entry on FreeDOS : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedos.

DOSBox or VMWare Player + FreeDOS.

Really, though, who still uses dos apps?

Win32 compatibility is decent with Wine, though it has to be the most user hostile piece of software I deal with. Crossover Office is worth the money if you need to run Windows apps.

I'd like to suggest that the voting computers are more complex than they really need to be. I mean, do you need a gigahertz processor to process checkmarks? So, let's think Keep It Simple, and pull an old old 80386 or so out of the dustbin, and use it as the starting point for a vote-collecting computer. It can't run Windows, so that means no "crackers" can use Windows vulnerabilities to mess with it.

Let's install FreeDOS, so we know that the Operating System is Open Source. There is a possibility that if it is stable enough, this part of the voting computer software NEVER needs to be upgraded. We all know that new features come with new bugs, so the simplest way to avoid it is to have the absolute minimum of features (therefore a minimal FreeDOS installation.

Now we need a vote-collecting program. Duh, most SlashDot readers could probably write something in ancient GWBASIC that could do that, and it would be Open Source, too. Unfortunately, the GWBASIC interpreter is a Microsoft program, not Open Source, which I think the FreeDOS team has not tried to clone. However, there is also an IBM program, QBASIC, which maybe IBM could be persuaded to release as Open Source....

Next, if possible, we would like the vote-gathering program to NEVER need to be modified. I am very suspicious of existing black-box voting machines that have their software modified for every election. It is like we are asking for the machines to be rigged to give someone the election. Consider a simple punch-card-counting machine. It has to know which punches stand for what/which person or thing being voted. And it has a clock. The software could check the clock, and during Certification Testing by election officials, work completely fairly. Come election day, it runs a modified program that gives away the election. How can we know, if we don't have access to the source code?

So the solution here is to try to never need to modify the vote-gathering program. One way to do that is to use a simple "template" document, that the voting program reads and displays to the voter. This template is the only thing that needs to be edited for each election. It contains the wording of any public initiatives being voted upon, it has page breaks for different screen presentations, and so on. It would also include "key" data for such things as Record #1 = Votes for Candidate Jones, Record #2 = Votes for Candidate Smith, etc. These record numbers refer to the simple datafile, why not a text file, that would hold the vote totals. This text file would have its data loaded for each voter, updated as votes are entered, and saved when the voter finishes. Its file name can be different for each election, based on the computer's clock, so old datafiles can be preserved for years before being deleted. The template file can always have the same name, but its entire content could be the first thing dumped into the data file.

The vote-collecting computer needs an Uninterruptable Power Supply, of course. And a special printer. We want a kind of "receipt printer" that can handle a huge roll of narrow paper. Like a tape recorder, this roll unwinds off the "blank" spool and winds onto the "printed" spool". There is a shield with a hole in it, so that only the most recently printed data can be viewed by the voter. As the voter declares that voting is complete, the next step is verify a display screen. If verified, and there are warnings about not being able to go back to change a vote after this point, the next step is to print it. The voter can compare the printout to the display screen. When that is accepted, then the voter leaves (and the saved datafile is updated, and a Form Feed scrolls some blank paper into the view of the next voter). Now we have a trustworthy paper trail for this machine, for each voting machine, in case of contested elections.

Since I didn't say that our old old computer processor is connected to obsolete hardware, we can imagine a

To get a decent range of functionality, however, WILL require that you use commercial software, not least to get an IP stack. Once you've done that, there's some old NCSA applications that support it, like telnet and even lynx.

No, you don't. :)

http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/freedos-lsm.cgi?q=d &a=net :)

The submitter didn't even bother putting a link to freedos.org into the submission!

There's no such things as FreeDOS nowadays, which was developped to late to be anything useful, specially it's not used by many people (including hardware manufacturer and corporate IT staff) to build bootdisks used to flash and upgrade firmwares and BIOSes(1). Neither is it used by computer manufacturer who signed an agreement with a popular OS company that forbids them to sell a computer without an OS.

Whith such an exemple of another old system, we can be sure that nobody will find whatever use for ReactOS, given the fact that Windows Vista will retain no compatibility with a legacy of win32 APPs and has nothing to do with the NT family which is emulated by ReactOS and Wine. And ReactOS and Wine have stated that they will never, I mean really never try to implement more modern API like Win64 and thus won't be able to run all the huge amount of 64bit apps that are seen everywhere (and of which most aren't open-source anyway and aren't ported to linux either (2) ).

ReactOS is likely to die and go the Linux/BSD way. Netcraft is confirming it in Soviet Russia. In Korea, only old people find usefulness to free and open alternatives that retain compatibility to commercial versions.

Har, har, har.

1 - bootdisks and -CD are specially popular in big places where you need to quickly upgrade BIOSes and Firmware non-interactively just by pluging a disc. The same can't be achieved from windows yet (there are windows-based flasher, but they can't be deployed thru usual network channels as software update)
2 - Windows 64bits is once again a proof of the supperiority of open-source. The first softwares that was the most easily ported to Win64 API were the open-source one, were the developpement is much easier because of source code availability : 7Zip, Blender&Yafray, Mame, FireFox, PuTTY, POV, VirtualDub, and many other. Where as only a couple of commercial games (because they make nice tech demos in booths) were ported, and almost no commercial multimedia package (although multimedia was supposed to benefit the most from the increased memory address space and was hoped to be among the first ported to Win64).

DOS is one of several operating systems that I have installed and can boot-up into on my AMD Athlon 64 3800+ computer. I actually have PC-DOS 2000 (instead of FreeDOS) installed on the first partition of my first harddrive, it is a FAT-16 partition. When booting up, a menu appears that allows me to choose whether to boot up into Windows 2000, PC-DOS 2000. or one of several different versions of Linux. PC-DOS 2000 was a minor Y2K upgrade of the Last version of DOS that IBM had released. As you may recall, Microsoft and IBM each had their own versions of DOS since back in the 1980's Surprisingly, my AMD Athlon 64 can run more than just 64-bit software. I don't recall if DOS is 16-bit software or what, but it runs just fine on my AMD Athon 64.

The obvious question is why would anyone want to run DOS on a modern computer? Well, I have fond memories of tinkering with batch files, DOS commands and old DOS games back in the late 1980's and early 1990s. Every once in a while, I like to re-experience the retro experience of what it was like to run DOS. I do not boot-up into DOS very often, but I am glad that I can choose to boot up into DOS once in a while when I want to. Of course Linux, Windows or almost any other modern OS is actually better on a modern desktop computer for everyday use.

I actually have a mixture of Free-DOS and PC-DOS 2000 installed on the fat-16 partition. If I remember correctly, I did that by installing FreeDOS first and then later installing PC-DOS 2000 on top of it. Afterwards, I then manually edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to remove any wierdness that resulted from istalling both that way. I had a slight preference for the PC-DOS 2000 but doing it that way gave me all the extra free software and some Linux/Unix like commands that come with the FreeDOS. Am I the only one out there who occasionally boots his AMD Athlon 64 3800+ up into DOS?

There are actually several choices for running old DOS programs. One choice is Free-DOS. Another choice is DR-DOS/OpenDOS which, if I understand correctly, is a commercial product in which the source code of the kernel has been under an Open Source license. Another alternative is to run the free DOSBox emulator under Windows or Linux. Using DOSBox I have been able to run old DOS games such as "Commader Keen" under Linux and even managed to get my USB joystick and modern soundcard to work with it. Yet another option is to use VMWare to create a virtual machine for FreeDOS and run it in a virtual machine under either Linux or Windows. Even though their are other alternatives, I am glad to see that the FreeDOS project is still alive and about to release version 1.0.

DOS is not supported by Microsoft. But that doesn't mean that it's unsupported; FreeDOS.

This is cool, I like it, but I want to dual boot on the Mac Mini; and by dual boot I mean like I have it now on my old iBook -- OS X and Linux. I don't want Windows on it. So, my question, when you boot holding down the 'option' key on the Mac can you make it so you'll have the option of OS X or Linux .. ?

I've played with Boot Camp, but haven't done much with it. But from what I understand by reading the wiki, you can create a dual-boot MacOSX/Linux system. However, the BootCamp Assistant seems (inferred by TFA) to prefer you have one partition per operating system on the disk space you set up. I don't understand why, though (when I booted FreeDOS, then ran FDISK, it appeared as though the presented "hard drive" had no partitions, suggesting you could create your own partitions.)

If you want to be safe, I'd go ahead and follow the usual instructions with BootCamp Assistant, create a single Linux partition (no swap), and create a swap file in that partition.

At least, I infer that from TFA. As I said, when I experimented with it, it looked like you could create partitions as you would on any PC, when you booted into the "Windows" area (faked BIOS.)

I'll try this on the iMac I have at work in the next week ... see my web site for updates.

However, quite a few people will probably keep the default OS out of laziness, if nothing else, so Windows will loose market share.

If they installed a working, full featured Linux distro this would be true. Past experience shows that whenever Linux gets preinstalled in the U.S. it's some stripped-down useless distro like Thizlinux, Linspire or FreeDos.

I'm not sure who the marketing geniuses are that pick ThizLinux over Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, Mepis, Ubuntu, etc.....but it seems fairly consistent.

they are only targetting PC makers that have agreed to only sell PCs with their OS on them, then they have a legal, though morally questionable, right to do this. However, it seems they are targetting all PC makers. Right now, this is basically just marketing, but if they actually take action against computer makers who sell "naked" PCs, such as refusing to license the Windows OS to them because of it, they run the risk of once again being brought up on charges of monpolistic practices. To say that a PC sold without an OS will undoubtedly be used to pirate Windows is an absurd stance, and so forcing PC makers to sell PCs with Windows pre-installed in order to avoid such piracy is not valid. If Microsoft presses the issue too hard, they're going to end up making their lawyers very happy once again.

Dell and Gateway comply with this agreement for "naked" PCs by including http://www.freedos.org/ with the PCs. The work-around on this is simple as thowing a $0.50 CD-R in the box with the PC.

All this app does is partition the disk, and burn a CD with the drivers that Windows needs to use Apple's hardware. If you want to run Linux, you're still on your own.

Not as bad as you think, though. I have an Intel iMac, and I was able to download and install the Boot Camp beta. Yes, it really is easy. Clearly, it provides an emulated BIOS for the hosted operating system. They intend for you to install Windows XP SP2 in here, but there's no reason you can't install something else.

Like FreeDOS, for example. No, that's not a faked photograph - it really is FreeDOS booted natively on an iMac!

Linux will run just happily under Boot Camp, too. At least, I booted the Fedora Core 5 installer, and it went into graphics mode ("vesa") just fine. I can provide another cell phone photo on that, if you need it. I intend to burn a single-disc DVD installer for FC5, and install on the 5GB space I carved out for myself. I'll definitely post photos to my web site when I've done it.

Microsoft's request isn't all that difficult to follow; just put FreeDOS on every machine. Everybody wins!

Yes, it is indeed.

Hum, finally a good comment on this. You know, you have quite a few alternatives in x86/amd64 operating systems, even from the Great Satan itself!

... and supported. Here are the Dell Open-Source Desktops. But, as you read the fine print you learn that there is nothing "Open-Source" about these desktops except the included FreeDOS media kit.

Can it run on FreeDOS? The old stuff, I mean.

The GNU GPL is quite clear. In section 7, it says:

7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

The "For example" is the case that could affect Linux (or FreeDOS, the project I'm attached to). If Microsoft decides to charge a royalty for use the FAT technology, then Linux (or FreeDOS) could not use it. (And since FAT is pretty much a requirement for DOS, that would be a huge problem for FreeDOS.)

For now, we are probably safe. Microsoft seems to intend to charge for the FAT technology as it applies to manufacturers of devices.

Microsoft's page specifically mentions:

• A license for removable solid state media manufacturers
• A license for manufacturers of certain consumer electronics devices

Linux (and FreeDOS) is an operating system that reads and writes FAT, so we are not bound at this time by any royalty.

I have not read the patent filings for myself (yet), so I do not know yet if there are any other issues to this.

-jh

There is no OpenDOS in FreeDOS, which was originally PD-DOS: a brief history of FreeDOS. Here is the announcement.

There is no OpenDOS in FreeDOS, which was originally PD-DOS: a brief history of FreeDOS. Here is the announcement.

Dell offers specific machines (the n-series I beleive) with FreeDOS.

Do it yourself :)

necessary tools
1) Vmware viewer
2)Daemontools or similar software for loading virtual CDs
3)ISO of freedos (installable version)
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/

4)ISO of freedoslite
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/fdoslite.html

3)the Browser appliance disk image available from VMware

preliminary steps
The configureation file for the browser appliance disk image sets the amount of ram needed at 256 MB.Not only is this overkill, it prevents the image from running on systems that really are adequete for the task.

To do this open up the browser appliance configureation file with notepad, and change memsize = "256" to a smaller value.I set it as 64MB

Now we need to get rid of the stripped down ubuntu install in the disc image.To do this we're using a CD version of freedos, either as an image or a drive. However, this is a little trickier than it would seem. WMware viewer will consider the LAST drive as the CD drive it can read.Thus it would be a good idea to use a virtual drive with its letter set to Z as the source drive for freedos.

Now, once you have that freedos disc loaded, load up the VMware image you are using.At the initial VMware screen press escape to go to the boot menu, and select "CD-ROM DRIVE"

This should bring you to the freedos installer
select the first option
"prepare the hard disk for installation of freedos...by running fdisk...."
this should bring you to FDISK, and a screen asking you if you want to enable large disk support. press Y and enter.

This brings you to the main Fdisk screen. From here select the third option to delete a partition, and the forth option on the next screen to delete non dos partition. There is only one non dos partition so press 1 and enter.Press escape and go back to the main screen
select the first option, to create a new parition, and the first option again, to make a new FAT partition, agree to make it the maximum possible size (Y then enter), and when you're back to the main screen, exit Fdisk.

This should restart the system. Press escape and choose to boot from CD again.At this point, GRUB (the linux bootloader) is messed so you have little option anyway.

at the Freedos installer, select the first option again, and this time format the disk.
choose to install freedos with freedos setup

choose to configure freedos setup at the next screen(first option)
and choose to start install on the screen after that(first option)

this brings you to a LONG file which you can skip by pressing esc after which you come to the graphical installer. Install.

Now mount freedoslite into your virtual CD drive. choose freeFDISK and create MBR
reboot.

You should now have a Disk image of Freedos,on a FAT 32 filesystem over which you can install your OS of choice.

Faileas Grey

Do it yourself :)

necessary tools
1) Vmware viewer
2)Daemontools or similar software for loading virtual CDs
3)ISO of freedos (installable version)
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/

4)ISO of freedoslite
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/fdoslite.html

3)the Browser appliance disk image available from VMware

preliminary steps
The configureation file for the browser appliance disk image sets the amount of ram needed at 256 MB.Not only is this overkill, it prevents the image from running on systems that really are adequete for the task.

To do this open up the browser appliance configureation file with notepad, and change memsize = "256" to a smaller value.I set it as 64MB

Now we need to get rid of the stripped down ubuntu install in the disc image.To do this we're using a CD version of freedos, either as an image or a drive. However, this is a little trickier than it would seem. WMware viewer will consider the LAST drive as the CD drive it can read.Thus it would be a good idea to use a virtual drive with its letter set to Z as the source drive for freedos.

Now, once you have that freedos disc loaded, load up the VMware image you are using.At the initial VMware screen press escape to go to the boot menu, and select "CD-ROM DRIVE"

This should bring you to the freedos installer
select the first option
"prepare the hard disk for installation of freedos...by running fdisk...."
this should bring you to FDISK, and a screen asking you if you want to enable large disk support. press Y and enter.

This brings you to the main Fdisk screen. From here select the third option to delete a partition, and the forth option on the next screen to delete non dos partition. There is only one non dos partition so press 1 and enter.Press escape and go back to the main screen
select the first option, to create a new parition, and the first option again, to make a new FAT partition, agree to make it the maximum possible size (Y then enter), and when you're back to the main screen, exit Fdisk.

This should restart the system. Press escape and choose to boot from CD again.At this point, GRUB (the linux bootloader) is messed so you have little option anyway.

at the Freedos installer, select the first option again, and this time format the disk.
choose to install freedos with freedos setup

choose to configure freedos setup at the next screen(first option)
and choose to start install on the screen after that(first option)

this brings you to a LONG file which you can skip by pressing esc after which you come to the graphical installer. Install.

Now mount freedoslite into your virtual CD drive. choose freeFDISK and create MBR
reboot.

You should now have a Disk image of Freedos,on a FAT 32 filesystem over which you can install your OS of choice.

Faileas Grey

Added a FreeDOS environment runnable from cdrom (previously known as ODIN bootdisk)

If Dell includes a liveCD then it all makes sense to me. If not, then I agree with you that something doesn't make sense.

1. Wipe HD.
2. http://www.freedos.org/

Get DOSBox or dual boot with FreeDOS.

I'm slightly off-topic, but I'll post anywaya and risk the karma:

From TFA:

Some quotes: "For the version I worked on, we sweated bullets to make it backwards compatible with existing applications." "We had to make changes to DOS to help some very old applications that were doing some very bad things (like writing to files that had already closed their FCB's). DOS had to stand on its head to make every application work from version to version, including Lotus."

To me, this is a very interesting part of the article. On the FreeDOS Project we have recently had a thread about chasing MS-DOS compatibility. One side of the argument says that we should not be satisfied until we have implemented every quirk/feature of MS-DOS. Another side argues that as long as DOS applications that people use today work (for example, games and embedded systems) then we have done our job; we can implement any broken/missing stuff as it is discovered.

I've always considered myself on the "DOS should be a usable operating system, and we shouldn't be afraid to throw off 'crutches' that are no longer needed" side of the fence. When we wrote the FreeDOS Spec all those years ago, I deprecated some commands/programs because they were "crutches" to help applications written for earlier versions of DOS to run on newer versions of DOS. Other programs were reduced in scope, because the extra functionality really wasn't needed today (for example, DEFRAG was taken off the list, because so many freeware / shareware / commercial defraggers exist - or because many people run FreeDOS in a DOS emulator like VMWare or DOSemu, and defraggers aren't needed.)

Compatibility for the sake of supporting applications is good. Compatibility for the sake of compatibility is not necessarily good.

Or, download for free.

NO, that price goes to dos. Spend two entire afternoons trying to get it to work on my brothers computer.

Actually what was phased out way before the floppy you talk about is DOS. Somehow manufacturers take for granted one should have access to DOS. The only reasonable accessible version of DOS today (if you don't want to illegally copy an old DOS version, not that it will boot from USB or CD anyway) is FreeDOS http://www.freedos.org/, hell... there's even an ISO.