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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.
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.
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...
"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 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
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...
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.
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.
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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I post links to stuff here
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/
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
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
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.
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