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FreeDOS
Jim Hall writes: "Newsforge [ed. note: Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN]
is running an article
about the FreeDOS Project.
If you don't know: FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system, and is released under the GNU General Public License. It's a good read. From the article: 'But, in the true spirit of Open Source, FreeDOS is not content to be an imitation of the existing technology. ... Open Source talks about freedom to use, but it also means freedom to choose. FreeDOS gives people another choice. If you don't want DOS, try something else. But if DOS might be the key for that special device you are building, check out FreeDOS. It is definitely worth a look.'" We did an interview with Hall two years ago - looks like the project has come a long way since then.
I would rather work in DOS than Windows. Windows gets in the way of productivity
photosMy Photostream
time to dust off the scorched earth disk!
I thought windows let people copy dos, i thought they released the patent? But i highly doubt that they made it open.
Carpe meam simiam!
At half the price, it would still cost two-times too much...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
freedos -> windows emulation -> msword 6.0 for win3.1?
everyone could just save their docs in word 6.0 format and everyone would be able to read it...
wait... is this freedos thing a virtual machine that runs on top of *nix?
my blog
That brings back memories. The article asks, "When was 270MB enough for anything lately?" When I had a 20MB drive on my hand-me-down Leading Edge XT - and that was big. Really though, this is good. I've been watching them for some time, and their project can only become more useful as Microsoft makes sure that it's impossible to get a DOS license. Open source developers are interestingly enough the only people protecting the world from obsolescence. It's a shame Linux isn't really installable in its modern incarnations on any machine older than a 486, but good old minix is still available at http://www.minix.org. Remember, this was Linus' base for linux. Minix, unlike DOS, is already fully TCP/IP ready... there is a good site describing how to get on the internet using an XT and Minix. Also, minix.org reminds me of the way linux.org looked about five years ago, pre-commercialization.
Why spend time developing an MS-DOS compatible operating system that is obsolete and hardly used. Doesn't Windows XP not allow DOS apps to run. Wouldn't time be better spent developing a compatible Windows XP/NT compatible operating system, like WINE is aimed to do?
--Metrollica
Boot disks. A DOS boot disk with fdisk, partition magic, norton, or ghost is still quite useful at times.
Engineering. Lots of engineering programs at univerisity's currently run on older OSes then we'd all like. FreeDOS will allow schools to use older software without having to pay licensing fees for the OS too.
Distribution. It's easier to share old DOS games that no longer work under windows with your
Emulation. Unix people can use this to load DOS programs.
I'm sure I'm probably overlooking most potential uses of FreeDOS but I'm going to call it quits and let the rest of the group figure them out...
That would be kinda twisted wouldn't it?
"The site www.freedos.org is running Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.1.1 FrontPage/4.0.4.3 on Linux."
I remember checking this website out awhile ago on one of my random surf-abouts. I'm quite impressed that they've made such progress since then.
offtopic part: It struck me when I visited freedos.org how many open source websites look similar. Then it occurred to me how the effect is a kind of brand recognition. Or, even a catalog of free software. Neat.
I've used FreeDOS and projects like it for years, partly because I'm cheap, but also because FreeDOS works very nicely!
Rock on!
I have found their fdisk to be most useful.
Among other things it recognizes non-dos partitions.
Were that I say, pancakes?
FreeDOS Frequently Asked Questions
Cygwin is a collection of Unix program
for running under windows. If your boss forces
you to work on Windows at work, you can
download Cygwin and have gcc, bash, vi, make, grep,
gawk, sed, sort, bc, wget, etc.
Download the latest Mozilla and you
can pretend your free.
DOS is acutally ok as a pseudo real time operating
system. You can write your code in a tight loop
or have device drivers handle the interrupts properly and actually do things fast enough.It's no substitute for a real time operating system; but's it's good enough for simple stuff. A lot of
"embedded" progamming fits under this category.
Our company still uses DOS for production line control, because there are some great legacy apps, and it is STABLE.
It will interesting to see what the "thousand eyes" does with regards to improving this OS.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
Might as well open source more useless crap! How about jumbo tape drives and cga monitors?
After over a decade of work, the project has recreated all of the userland DOS applications including COMMAND.COM, XCOPY.EXE, FDISK.EXE, and many more. The powerful .BAT shell language has been cloned. Even enterprise-level development environments such as QBASIC are complete.
However, the goal of creating a new, next-generation DOS kernel remains unfulfilled. Perhaps the bar was set too high. As of now, the system runs on an implementation of IO.SYS written by some Scandinavian college kid.
You know, I can still remember getting my sweaty paws on my first 486dx33 with 4MB RAM, 1MB graphic card and huge 40MB hard-drive. This was a real "power-user" machine when I spent almost 3000 quid on it :-) Since I used to write in nothing but assembler, it was astonishingly fast after my little sinclair ZX spectrum (which did me proud for many years). I remember saving up to double the RAM so that Doom would run better.
:-)
I think my machine came with Win3.1 installed too, but I only ever started it up to laugh at it and watch it crash
It might seem redundant to re-develop DOS, but for games use, it's an excellent OS, since a game will have 100% of the CPU time, all the time! For realtime use too, it beats most modern OS'. I'd imagine it would make a great OS for a SOHO router/firewall, as no-one could login to it from the outside...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
ROFLMAO! Last time I checked, the only thing the fortune 500 company I work uses QBASIC for is to play nibbles.
Y'know, I'm getting a little pissed at this Microsoft acting like they have the only disk operating system in existence.
cp/m works great for me, and I see no reason to change. (Seriously!)
Like I just posted over on the newsforge forum, this would be a godsend for companies that use DOS for their firmware/bios/eeprom flash utilities (perfectly understandably, you don't need or want the memory protection of something more sophisticated than DOS if your goal is to do dangerous, illegitimate, obscene things to various memory-mapped fiddly bits ;-) ). Why? The ability to distribute fully functional dos disks without license hassles, because more and more mainstream i386 users are losing the ability to boot to DOS (i.e. they're transitioning to NT-based Microsoft products or Unix-based things).
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Finally, and slashdot story I know everything about :-)
I found the project ~2 years ago, while attempting to
write a DOS extender, and I have been playing with
it ever since.
FreeDOS is only a DOS in that it implements the DOS API,
and does not provide "hardcoded offsets" like commercial DOSes
(for the sane minds, back in DOS, major application
developers disassembled the undocumented kernel
and found what effects of reading/writing/jumping-to
a particular address has on the system. Usually,
those "effects" were interesting features, which
cutting-edge apps made use of.)
FreeDOS does not do that, but it has everything
else DOS had; Think of it like this, it runs SoftIce without a patch or recompilation!
and SICE is a system debugger, that knows way too
much about the kernel.
I tried to hack the kernel by just reading the author's
website -he had an overview of how everything went- but there were no contributing developers.
So dump me (or was it the combination of coffee and teen age?)
I poured on the sources for weeks, without ever
scratching the surface. Then I found "The FreeDOS kernel"
in a second hand store!
Here is where things get interesting. If you ever
hacked DOS, you know what the PSP, UMB, FAT, and
all the other acronyms, which are the hallmarks of poor design and implementation
exposure, are.
Everything is there!
I know Pat is a creative man (I saw his model trains.)
and I know he was targeting the heaps of text
and wetware out there for DOS, but the reimplementation of
everything good and bad about DOS is painfully
ugly.
The chapter on memory management is an example of
this. The memory allocation algorithm is too
complicated for a single tasking OS (sic) just for
the terminology, if not for anything (arenas, banks, segments, overlaying, extending, etc.)
Wait before you point the finger of blame on the
intel architecture. DOS only sees a perfect 16bit
machine, only authors of multi-tasking OSes and
DOS extenders need to worry about memory management
services implemented in the 32-bit part of the
machine.
So all the complexity, is for 16-bits only!
TO spare you the thrill, FreeDOS is an interesting
hackable piece, only if you come from a DOS background.
It could serve as an eye opener for luckier developers
(Java guys I am looking at you.)
Also, for the casual DOS user, it is an excellent
alternative to the realthing (I kid you not, single
tasking is not fun, use sparingly.)
It runs all the important apps, 4DOS, turboC, SoftIce,
several editors, and a host of other well behaving
apps. It even has its own GUI desktop and a web
browser.
OK, besides being able to flash my motherboard BIOS, what else will this be used for? I did some embedded dos work years ago and I hated every minute of it....memory management...watt tcp layers for networking....uuugh!
A linux kernel can be very small with lots of stuff built in. Why would anyone use DOS?
-ted
Finally the beginnings of Open Source(tm)'s domination!!!
Now that we have DOS, we can begin reimplementing our 32bit OS on top of it! We'll wrap it around the DOS core and try and sell people on the idea that its still an advanced OS. Then we can finally acheive the reliability and performace of Windows.
Forgive me, its late....
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
what am I missing?
Yeah, I built my model railroad controller with an embedded 386 and PC-DOS so I'm a bit biased, but DOS still has its place in today's world.
Oh, and to run a DOS PC without a graphics card, just enter (or put in autoxec.bat) ctty com1:. The serial port will be used as console (use mode to set parameters).
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
DOOM, DOOM and more DOOM.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I'm currently working on a MAME cabinet and when I was first setting up the software I determined that DOS was going to be my best bet (most stable, and I have a lot of DOS experience). It made sense to keep what is essentially going to be an embedded solution as simple as possible...
Anyways, I eventually found my old DOS 6.2 disks (took me the greater part of a week) but one of them had gone bad. After another week I found an image of that disk online and finally was able to get the system running. Of course *after* all of that I find out about FreeDOS and I'm currently in the process of moving everything over to it.
But there's an even bigger benefit! I've had such a good time building this system I'm seriously looking into starting a small business building custom MAME cocktail cabinets (people send the old computers and I do the conversion) and now the only software that I can't legally include with the system is the game ROMs. W00t! I might yet be able to make a business out of this!
A|Q|U|A
The main problem with DOS is that it runs in real-mode, and therefore has a 1mb addressable memory limit.
Aside from this problem, a web server running on DOS could be more scalable than *nix or NT. The reason for this is simple: there would be no operating system overhead. An implementatin that eschewed the kernel paradigm, stayed away from threads and processes, could be able to handle a lot of connections.
I use several DOS-only apps to drive some computer-controlled radios and radio scanners. Also, many 2-way radios I use are programmed with DOS applications that talk to the radio via a serial cable. I was beginning to sweat some things, since DOS (and DOS-capable machines) is harder and harder to find. This will be a great help for many of my projects!
Desqview This was posted in an eariler slashdot article. A small window manager that was really good at its job. An X11 gui that sits on dos. Might be fun to combine this and FreeDOS.
The FreeDOS people have a great concept and should not leave themselves open to such an easy lawsuit. Their project is worth finishing. I doubt any of us want them to get sued for having a name that sounds like DOS.
DOS is STIL DED!!!
CMDR TCO iz stil VARY gay! plz fix, thnx!
I wonder if this project has anything to do with the spread of the actual DOS 6.22 source code a while ago ...
[alk]
This is kinda creepy. With WinTX being developed, isn't this strangely like the evolution of Windows? Windows 1.0 was a primitive GUI system, with only a few apps, that sat on top of DOS. WinTX is more advanced though, sorta learning from the past. Who knows, we may even see an open source Win95 about 10 years down the line!
I'll have to try this out. If it works right, I might even be able to go back to using my old favorite word processor / text editor, Wordstar 3.3.
... :)
I've been unable to use it under Windows because their "DOS box" does not implement the old CPM-style file control blocks. The program runs, you can type whatever you want, and when you save it, it gives no errors, but doesn't save anything. I've had to learn a whole new editor, just to be able to survive.
If this works, I'll be a VERY happy camper indeed! Now, to resurrect my old 84-key keyboard
Lemon curry?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, Soft-Ice can run on any real mode OS with no problem. It can even be used to debug the BIOS or boot sector with no OS loaded. Thus, being able to run Soft-Ice on freeDOS does not indicate a level of MSDOS compatiblity for freeDOS.
Why do you say a bunch of old DOS acronyms are the hallmark of poor design and exposure? All OS's have data structures with names. All non-protected OS's have accessable data structures. So what you say is just a non-sequitor.
Without DOS I would have been ever lost in the command line world of Unix. Thank you DOS for helping me understand extended and expanded memory, and knowing what IRQ's and DMA's were so I could make a custom boot disk perfectly suitable for Leisure Suit Larry 3.
A pixelized naked woman never looked so good....
For true near-100% MSDOS compliance, with FAT32 support, multitasking and much more more as well, you want DRDOS-7.03 here. And no, you don't want the unofficial 7.04 and 7.05 which are actually broken in some respects.
DRDOS delivers really good compatibility, because it emulates most (if not all) MSDOS flaws on purpose. The flip side is, it's not free nor is it opensource.
DISCLAIMER : I used to maintain parts of the DRDOS kernel, so I'm biased.
Bart Oldeman is maintaining it at this point. In fact, when I last heard, he was also doing most of the recent work on the FreeDOS kernel. It seems that he is quite the coding machine. Almost every night, an announcement would seem to appear on the kernel mailing list.
At the beginning, they used an old image of a hard drive with FreeDOS installed. You would be able to install it with rpm. A while ago, they managed to improve DOSEmu to the point where you don't have to have the image anymore. You could just read off of an actual partition. In other words, you could dual boot into FreeDOS, or use DOSEmu once you boot into Linux.
Pretty convenient if you ask me.
testing out my trending skills
Am I the only one who, to his shame, misread the title as "Free Denial Of Service" initally?
:)
Oops
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
It's a hell of a lot easier for newbies to write plain assembler for DOS, not to mention most x86 assembler books are best used with DOS and something like NASM-IDE.
I failed to do this in my teens, let's see if some
kid can revenge me.
Write a tiny 32-bit microkernel that runs 2 or more FreeDOS kernels,
each in their own virtual 86 mode, and
each accessible through an Fn (function) key.
I personally figured it too late (after I was
forced to modify a Linux kernel for work.)
But it would be cool to have some kid, still at
mom's basement full of energy do this for me, and
tell me I wasn't the only 17 year old who missed
way too many parties, hacking.
So many motherboard bios update utilities require that you boot DOS to run 'em. It would be grand if the bios folks would start making bootable update disks available, with FreeDOS all ready to go so we don't have to try to find a dusty old copy of DOS 5.0 or 3.2 to update the bios on a shiny new P4 motherboard.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
This is silly. DOS is an acronym, standing for Disk Operating System. MS-DOS is just one of many DOSs that have existed over the years. Now PC-DOS was basically MS-DOS, but DR-DOS was an entirely independant codebase. (Well, not entirely, it was developed from CPM by Digital Research who actually owned CP/M, while MS-DOS is derived from a CP/M knockoff called QDOS, but the point is DR-DOS was not an MS-DOS derivative.) But that was hardly the first DOS by any means. AmigaDOS ring a bell? AppleDOS?
I believe the first OS to bear the name DOS actually ran on an ancient (pre-x86) IBM box, but I could be wrong. At any rate, there is no trademark infringement problem with the acronym DOS, it was in wide use well before MS-DOS came around.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Hey, if freeDOS can be released under the GNU, then why can't more free pr0n? I say that we get Katz, and actually put his ability to make up facts and inflate normally short articles to use. He could write letters to pr0n providers to get them to provide free pr0n to /.! Who's with me???
Open Source talks about freedom to use, but it also means freedom to choose. FreeDOS gives people another choice. If you don't want DOS, try something else
Does closed-source software not offer the same merits? I used DR DOS for a while too. PC-DOS also existed. Then there was GEM vs Windows, and later on we had OS/2. Let's not over-exaggerate the virtues of open-source - next we will be claiming, rightly but superflously, that it low in cholesterol!
I wonder if it will work with SLE? Now you don't have to pirate DOS and you can be _somewhat_ legel in your illegal hobby (for those in the US anyway)
..can't the nomes here think of anything other than "it's a good/great/must read" as a kick-phrase?
We're numb to those words, ok? Overused; over-hyped; don't register any longer, etc.
Are we to conclude you people would say "to be missed....not to be read" at any time? Of course not, so please figure we expect you to be fatherly and instruct us to read it, and stop saying that as part of every lead, thanks.
Fuck vi! To hell with emacs!
Go edlin!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's hardly the words of the GPL, is it?
Christ, I thought Cmder taco was going to start cleaning this site up. YOu can hardly read an article around here without some flame-baiting moron trying to spread anti-Free Software propaganda.
I wish to hell that either M$ would take back their astro-turfers or Cmder Taco would take another look at making this a moderated BB.
Uh... Try google? Good point on the boot disk thing... I just went through boot disk hell (both my comps are win2k)... motherfucking luckily my roommate upgraded to xp a few weeks ago... Try anything at all to find one? Like say, uh... bootdisk.com?
By coincidence, that's the first I'd heard of this project in years -- and I just download that program a few days ago. Go figger.
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
Anyhow. Still, that works in most emulators, right? what's the need for FreeDOS? It's one of the re-invention the wheel thing that needs a wake up call. Plenty of cool stuff is out there, these guys need to put their skills (and I know they have em!) where needed, not in this FreeDOS shit. Hell, get enough people to sign on the line, and Dr. Dos could be opensourced easier than trying to develop FreeDOS.
I'm just saying, it's CUTE, yea, but useful? No, not to anyone anymore...
The only reason why DOS can be considered real-time is that it completely stays out of the way. DOS has the nature of a code library more than an operating system in that DOS only provides services in the form of extra system calls. It does not provide multi-threading, inter-process communication, timers, interrupt handling with controlled latency, or other things that normally are considered RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) services. DOS is not an RTOS, it is just a boot-loader for your own real-time programs.
You could just as well have used a simple boot loader together with a function library such as libc to get the same functionality.
This is not intended to bash against DOS; DOS might be the perfect choice for many applications. I just don't want people to confuse DOS with actual real-time operating systems.
I love DooM! And I love it even more under an improved engine. The old gameplay is still there, but with more eyecandy. Hi-res, even openGL, and mouselook are supported now.
Check out zDooM
In Windows XP,
Open 'My Computer'.
Right Click on your Floppy Disk Icon.
Select Format.
Click the button that says "Create an MS-DOS startup disk"
Format the disk.
Look at that, you have a DOS disk!
(Of course, this feature doesn't exist according to the average slashdot user, since XP is too busy giving out all your personal information, crashing, refusing to run any software, reporing you to the FBI, shutting itself down, keeping track of everything you do and going out with your girl when you're not looking.)
I use my Windows box only for gaming, but older DOS games are very hard and sometimes impossible to get to work on it. Since I don't know of a free x86 virtual machine for Windows in which I could run FreeDOS, I simply tried to get it to work on my old Mac through PC emulation. And boy did it work. The Mac even ran some games that the REAL x86 machine couldn't :)
It failed to run many of the old classics such as Monkey Island 2, but I got parts of the Ultima series to work. That was almost 8 months ago, I'm sure with some tweaking and the very latest FreeDOS you could get more games to run.
Don't forget that we WILL need some form of x86 virtual machine and a (hopefully Free) DOS if we want to run all this old stuff in the future. Microsoft does not want DOS compatibility in Windows anymore. Just imagine never being able to play Eye of the Beholder again. The tragedy.
Yeah, it's great and nifty and all, but it still won't run Star Control 2. Although there is now a Star Control 2 clone out, the original game won't run on anything well except the actual dos. WinNT, freedos and everything else just croaks on it. Last time I tried, freedos wouldn't even start it, and NT plays it so horridly slowly (1 frame per 3 seconds), that it's just crazy.
I'm waiting till it'll run Star Control 2...
-=Lothsahn=-
Does this mean that I can finally sell my copy of "Undocumented DOS"?
What is so amazing about DOS is how bad its APIs really were and how little it managed to do on what was, at the time, a pretty powerful machine. DOS is really the bottom of the barrel when it comes to operating systems. Yes, having a small single-tasking OS as a choice is nice, but, gosh, would it be nice if it were something, anything, other than DOS.
What's next? FreeWindows?
I installed it on vmware, and it works great !!
but i cant run seal. Any basic vga driver ?
And the best thing, we have tab completion, vim, etc.
Try this small os. It's very small and it carries the source code.
pizzios
Well, I think he's was talking about things like "DOS FAT was a bad design because it had to be extended about 5 times to keep up with bigger hard drives (remember FAT-12?), and it was too vulnerable to corruption." Things like that.
Female Prison Rape in NY
also you can download the complete watcom c/c++ compiler at www.openwatcom.org. Find the ftp link and get the individual zips or one 45 MB zip file
I work in a warehouse maintaining an inventory of surplus US Government Aircraft parts. To do this, we use MS DOS 6.22 and DBase 4.
It works like a charm and the machine never locks up. I recently installed an old menu program that lets me select tasks, such as defragging and backing up.
What's really funny is that now there are some people wanting to switch us to Windows and Access, both of which really give us nothing over our current setup!
Thought those chips ran at 100mhz tops?
I used to play with DOSEMU alot a while back. While I appreciate the work that FreeDOS has done, I always ended up dragging up the old floppies and using MS-DOS for my DOSEMU images because FreeDOS didn't support lredir. Without lredir, getting files to and from the DOSEMU enviroment was a bit of a hassle.
What's the reason that lredir can't work with FreeDOS, and is it being addressed?
I've been using FreeDOS recently to run old DOS door games on a Linux bbs, and it works almost perfectly (with the "press F5/F8 to skip/step through autoexec & config.sys" disabled, of course). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a version of Dosemu working with virtual com ports, but the door games mostly work fine in local mode.
Only game I've found serious problems with so far is TradeWars.. it seems that it needs share.exe to run, and it doesn't like the FreeDOS version of share. Anyone know a way around that problem?
DOS IS STILL USED BIG TIME. Maybe not for you yuppies, but take a walk through late night data processing centers where ghetto as folk live!
I've worked 4 jobs where DOS rules. Im only 27. Crappy industrial data entry type jobs but jeez, thats what computers in business are for, data. One was a mail sorter thingie, we pre-sorted mail that the big readers couldnt OCR. Handwritten, typewritten, type a few letters (like 5-6 letters worth) of an address and watch in one second the computer complete the address, and barcode the extra 4 digit zip. We coded between 500-600 envelopes an hour. Damn letter went by on a converyor belt.
Then late night sending car payments through a similar conveyer belt thingie, damn thing read what the car payment should be on a remit the customet mailed in, then right behind it you would put the check, we coded between 500-600 car payments an hour.
The other was "re-pricing" medical bills, about a hundred per hour in dbase.
I find it odd that a GPL'ed operating system project is build with proprietary compilers (Borland, Pacific, HiTech) when there is a GPL'ed 80186 compiler project (sdcc.sourceforge.net)
"DOS FAT was a bad design because it had to be extended about 5 times to keep up with bigger hard drives
That doesn't mean it was a bad design, it means future extendability wasn't built in.
it was too vulnerable to corruption
all fs are vulnerable to corruption. Some may store important data structures in more than one place, some may journal, some may even use striped hardware, but all can be corrupted.
Nostalgia my friend, nostalgia. Seriously though. I'm busting out my old 486 installing this and firing up some Wing Commander, Doom (who is the world can't bust through the original doom in under 5 minutes), and whatever else I have in that giant box of old DOS games. My weekend is shot now.
I see source code for some but not all of the FreeDOS work. This paragraph is from http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/ :
---
Were you looking for the source code? You may want to visit the FreeDOS developer page at SourceForge to get the source for the kernel, FreeCOM, and Install program. For more source code to FreeDOS, refer to the maintainers list.
---
If anyone has collected more source code and put it into a single file, please post!
> The memory allocation algorithm is too
complicated for a single tasking OS (sic)
MS-DOS 3.x started preparing for multi-tasking by adding some functionality remembered from MS Xenix (sold by MS to SCO).
From MS-DOS 3.1 was derived MS's first attempt at a multi-tasker: MS-DOS 4.0 (not to be confused with the much later MS-DOS 4.01). From 3.2 was derived MS-DOS 4.1.
The manuals on MS-DOS 4.x indicated how to develop portable apps that would work on 8086 and 8026 protected mode, apparently 4.2 was to use protected mode. In the end this 4.x series was dumped and replaced by MS-DOS 5.0 (not to be confused with the later MS-DOS 5) which did use 8026 protected mode and was renamed OS/2 when IBM provided funding.
'Software Interrupts' has a section on MS-DOS 4.x listing it as 'European DOS' as it was only adopted by Siemanns, ICL and Wang (AFAIK). From this it can be seen that it was attempting to provide a far wider set of services, some of which 'stuck' in later versions.
Now we can legaly make a dos bootdisk that is on a cd and load the CD up with our favorite games. doom, wolf3d, dukenukem, maybe even win 3.11, quake 1, etc.... oh the possibilitys.
nostalgia CD ver 0.1
I was recently searching for alternatives to purchasing new thin clients at work, when I ran across the FreeDOS project.
Right now, we run Citrix Metaframe on a "farm" of 6 servers, and employees do 90% of their work from within a Citrix ICA session. Most of their computers are 3+ year old Dell PCs, still running Windows NT 4.0, that have the Citrix "Program Neighborhood" software loaded on them.
Although some people will still need a full-blown PC running Windows because they use AutoCAD or other specialized software packages, the majority of our users just need basic applications that are available to them in Citrix.
We bought 20 Wyse thin clients, in a pilot project to replace older/unneeded PCs with them - but they haven't been too reliable. (I think 6 of the 20 have been back for repair after the first year - and Wyse takes over a month to ship repaired units back to us!) On top of that, they're not really that cost-effective, with the price of regular PCs dropping so low these days.
I realized I could "recycle" a bunch of our oldest PCs (even Pentium 100's!) by loading FreeDOS on them and using the DOS Citrix ICA client. Now, these old machines boot up in 10 seconds or so, right into a Windows 2000 desktop - served by Citrix, and they cost us nothing (besides a Windows terminal server connection license).
Now, the only issue I'm still left with is re-imaging. I tried using Symantec Ghost to make drive images of my FreeDOS/Citrix ICA installation - but when I Ghost it back to a system with a different size hard drive, sometimes it won't boot up. As far as I can tell, FreeDOS must save some type of information about the hard drive geometry in a file when you run a "SYS" command to make the drive bootable. Ghost must preserve this drive geometry data in the Ghost image, causing my problems. (If I boot from a bootable FreeDOS floppy and do a "SYS C:" on a freshly Ghosted drive that isn't booting, it works fine after that.)
Okay while your at it do a FreeCP/M or FreeMP/M that Ray Norda stole, excuse me reverse-engineered to be Novell. Why doesn't Ray Norda give the DR-DOS source to open source movement to fix. Maybe its screwed up memory management that was its real incompatiblily with Windows could be fixed.
This sounds like the same stuff that went on when DOS made CP/M history. CP/M had thousands of applications and uses, but at some point the past needs to be left in the past.
this paves the way for FreeWin3.1
to e-mail, remove '.dot.' from the address
Have you tried Tetanus On Drugs?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Also the the IBM EE (Easy Editor) will give you terminal braindamage (pun intended). Warez MS EDIT.COM and avoid at all costs.
If you get edit.com, don't get the edit.com from DOS 5 or 6, as that requires QBasic, can only have one file open, can't edit binary files, and can only edit up to a 64 KB file. You want edit.com from Windows 95, 98, or ME.
If you don't want to pirate anything, you can get DJGPP, which is a port of the GNU system to PC DOS platforms (MS-DOS, DR DOS, FreeDOS) with an i386-series CPU. It includes a port of GNU Emacs. And if you don't like Emacs, there's always GNU Nano, a clone of Pico that has also been ported to PC DOS, or SETEDIT, a free clone of the Borland editor for DOS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
However -- I am running DRDOS's EMM386 on this Win95 machine (which boots to M$DOS 7.0) because it provides better/faster/more-stable/less-leaky DPMI support than CWSDPMI.
CWSDPMI r4 or r5?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I run my telnet BBS under FreeDOS, and my web, mail, and other servers too. :)
Sounds like a plan. dos free forlife...
I know you're just being funny, but you were modded at level 3, so I guess I should point out a few things.
TRUE: the project has recreated all of the userland DOS applications including COMMAND.COM, XCOPY.EXE, FDISK.EXE, and many more. Yes, the .bat language has been recreated in FreeCOM (our command.com). There are BASIC interpreters out there for FreeDOS (I prefer BW-Basic, for those very rare occassions I touch BASIC.)
FALSE: the system runs on an implementation of IO.SYS written by some Scandinavian college kid. Not quite. FreeDOS was implemented from scratch, originally by Pat Villani (from the US, an embedded developer at the time.) Since then, we have had a few kernel maintainers, the last one being Bart Oldeman (UK).
You can't run cygwin (that's for Windows) but you can run the GNUish utilities. GNUish was started a long time ago to port (or recreate) GNU utilities on DOS. It's great!
Linux - needs a 386 or better
Dos - can run on that 8088 you're using to hold your screen door open
Linux - complicated
Dos - simple
Linux - multitasking
Dos - single tasking, which usually sux, unless you're playing a game and don't want that slowdown from background jobs.
FreeDos is never going to replace Linux, but it can go places Linux can't.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
... And farther down the line, in the most perfect of all worlds, it will be really cool to have around.
Unfortunately it all depends on the quality of the work that goes into it, and here the track record is not good.
Rickster/
radsoft.net
Yeah, strictly speaking that's true. But you're probably reading way more into that than reality warrants.
The kernel (particularly a DOS kernel, a true micro-kernel if ever there was one) doesn't need any more memory. Now I'm not one of those who will tell you they used MSDOS 1.0 (when MSDOS 1.0 came out, I was using a computer, but it sure as hell wasn't an x86 toy) but I started using MSDOS at version 3, and I've never seen a version of it that didn't allow applications to access more memory.
EMS allows any application program to access several megs of ram, very easily, through a sliding address translation frame located in high memory, with minimal overhead. This was apparently old hat among the more experienced x86 hands when I joined the club, in the DOS 3.x days, so it's hardly fair to claim that 1mb barrier as a limitation of the architecture.
Nice troll though, most of the readers are obviously completely ignorant of the actual mechanics of DOS.
*sigh* You made me feel old, you suck.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.