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.

Comments

fdisk

[belg4mit]

I have found their fdisk to be most useful.
Among other things it recognizes non-dos partitions.

Direct Links

[lw54]

This project has been going since 1994. Congrats to the FreeDOS team! I don't think I could have watched technology go by for 8 years and still work on the same project...

FreeDOS Frequently Asked Questions

• General Information
• Using FreeDOS
• Installing FreeDOS
• The FreeDOS Kernel

Re:Am I smoking crack?

[einstein]

sigh... I used to work for a large "We'll do your taxes and keep most of your refund" company... you guess which one. There were utilities they would give us tech workers in the field to manipulate some tax return data to convert it to another format that was written in qbasic. I was amused and very frightened at the same time.
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FreeDOS != MSDOS

[Jesse Duke]

As the article points out, FreeDOS aims at being better than MSDOS, which mean that it'll never be 100% MSDOS compliant, simply because half of MSDOS is broken.

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.

Recent developments of DOSEmu with FreeDOS.

[eugene ts wong]

I seem to remember there being a program called "dosemu" that was bundled with a lot of linux distributions in the past, which could run a virtualized dos session from *nix. In fact it used FreeDOS by default IIRC. I don't know what became of it though.

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.

DOS is not trademarked or trademarkable

[Arker]

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.