FreeDOS Turns 10 Years Old Today

Jim Hall writes "The FreeDOS Project turns 10 years old today! PD-DOS was announced to the world on June 28, 1994. The PD-DOS project was later renamed to the FreeDOS Project. We've come a long way in 10 years. Today, FreeDOS is ideal for anyone who wants to bundle a version of DOS without having to pay a royalty for use of DOS. FreeDOS will also work on old hardware, in DOS emulators, and in embedded systems. FreeDOS is also an invaluable resource for people who would like to develop their own operating system. While there are many free operating systems out there, no other free DOS-compatible operating system exists. Read more about the FreeDOS Project history in the About FreeDOS page."

Comments

os development

[ultrabot]

FreeDOS is also an invaluable resource for people who would like to develop their own operating system.

Doesn't sound like the heritage I would like to learn from :-).

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

People who use something like DOS to develop their own OS use it for testing their OS, not building off of DOS. DOS's strong point is its weak point, it can run another OS inside of it. People have been known to run linux from inside DOS. This is also a bad thing as far as security goes, you can take complete control of the computer, which is a reason why user accounts were useless in Windows 95/98/ME which was run on top of DOS.

Re:os development

[BladeMelbourne]

User accounts on Win9x/ME can offer preference/config personilisation for different users sitting at the computer. Convenience was the goal, not security. As Win9x/ME reside on FAT16/32 filesystems, any user can gain access to any file.

If one of those users wanted "complete control" of the computer - all they have to do is reboot the computer with an OS on a bootable CD (Knoppix, Gnoppix, etc). This can be done to take control of Linux, Win2K, WinXP, etc. NTFS is no obstacle, nor are the myriad of file systems available for use by a Linux installation. Encrypted file systems can prevent root access - but very few people have the time for this setup - plus recovery can be a real beatch.

The strong point of DOS is not being able to run another OS - it's being able to have more control over how you run certain applications. It can also facilitate recovery when things go wrong. The hardware requirements are less. Flexibility is a good thing. There is no need to port legacy apps that have been working flawlessly for years.

I personally dont use FreeDOS - I still have a Win98 partition with DOS installed. If I didn't own Win98 - FreeDOS is something I would explore for the rare occasions I would want to play old-school games.

DOS 6.22 (unsupported) can be downloaded free from: Micro$oft.com

Re:os development

[Jugalator]

Doesn't sound like the heritage I would like to learn from :-)

Come on, it beats even Linux hands down in the remote exploit area! I can't say I know a single person that had his DOS boxed hacked into remotely. I guess it's because of this there was no DOS firewalls! Who needs them when it has rock solid network security!?

Re:os development

[sr180]

If one of those users wanted "complete control" of the computer - all they have to do is reboot the computer with an OS on a bootable CD (Knoppix, Gnoppix, etc).

No, in 95/98, all they needed to do was click escape at the login box.

Re:os development

[BladeMelbourne]

I think it is click Cancel or press Escape to bypass the login screen.

Regardless, any user on Win9x could install/do/delete what they liked. Using DOS/FreeDOS provide similar flexibility (without needing to logon of course).

In many situations (like with my home PC) - physical access to the box by others is not a concern. At home I value the convenience over physical security as I know I am the only person who will sit at the keyboard. (yes I am firewalled - network security is another matter).

My point was, unlike the AC parent, I find user accounts in Win9x/ME to be useful. There are many situations where the lack of security/greater convenience is ideal - especially for 'power users' who know what they are doing - and want to do it quickly without the overhead of accounts and privs.

Re:os development

[bhtooefr]

That's a Step-Up version. Step-Up is the MS-DOS equivalent of Upgrade editions of Windows. It requires DOS to already be installed.

Re:os development

[eggsome]

No, in 95/98, all they needed to do was click escape at the login box

While that's true, it's important to remember that if you did choose cancel on the login box you would loose access to all network resources (not just the ones that you need a password for).

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a joke, please be aware that Dos is now networkable.
There *is* a tcp/ip stack for dos.
I've used it with Arachne, a webbrowser. (http://arachne.browser.org/)
I have heard of Dos Routers and firewalls, check out the simtel collection.

If you were serious, then yes. I have run a dos machine on a network, never had any remote exploits.
I know it's not statistically valid, and I was just goofing around, but dos can do quite a bit of stuff most folks would not expect.

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really this simple... I think they've only used the "step-up" name for the upgrade from 6.2 to 6.22, since it was so small... All the other upgrades were called, I believe, "Upgrade".

I could be wrong, this is all from memory. And I only started knowing this kind of thing around MS-DOS 5.0, although I had been using 3.3 and 4.01 for a while before that.

tmegapscm

Re:os development

[drwho]

I can't say I know a single person that had his DOS boxed hacked into remotely.

Ever heard of PC Anywhere? Several times I have come across these things, hooked up to DOS based PCs. These are typically long-forgotten specialty boxes, such as the one controlling the community events board of a cable TV franchise.

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

I myself don't know so much about OS architecture, but it seems to me that your post has a few flaws:

People who use something like DOS to develop their own OS use it for testing their OS, not building off of DOS

- I'm not sure that's what the guy was talking about. Even if MS-DOS is not the greatest example of OS design brilliance, it can teach someone its share of lessons. Not to mention the other, unrelated benefits of being able to see the source of the OS you're running your apps on. (Also, many people, like for example Andrew S. Tanenbaum, will agree that Linux is not the best example of a modern OS design, but that doesn't prevent lots of people from studying its source code.

DOS's strong point is its weak point, it can run another OS inside of it. People have been known to run linux from inside DOS.

- First: I'm not sure how true it is that "you can run another OS inside of it". [Once again, I'm no OS hacker.]

In the Linux case you mention, if you are referring to what I think you are, what I think happens is that Linux is started with a command from DOS, but then takes over the system, it's not running "inside" of DOS. I believe that, in those cases (BeOS PE inside W9x is another example) you cannot resume your DOS (or Windows) session after you quit the OS you started. I don't see why this would be a feature exclusive to DOS.

Windows 9x is not a valid example of DOS running another OS, Windows is basically an application running on DOS (and that's why you could type MODE CO80 (or similar MODE command) and see your DOS prompt at the Win95A "Your computer is now ready to be turned off" screen).

Another thing is emulation, which could be considered to effectively "run an OS inside another", but this isn't a feature exclusive to DOS.

This is also a bad thing as far as security goes, you can take complete control of the computer, which is a reason why user accounts were useless in Windows 95/98/ME which was run on top of DOS.

- As another posted commented wisely:

. The accounts were created for convenience, not security.
. The fact that anyone can look at any files doesn't have anything to do with "running an OS inside another"; there's the issue that the filesystem has no support for security, and the issue that if you are using another OS you can usually do anything you want with the filesystem, and filesystems that use only access control lists as their sole means of security are easily bypassed like that.

tmegapscm

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

More like Step-Sideways -- the only reason that DOS 6.22 exists is because of the Stacker patent lawsuit.

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

now networkable? Shit, I used DOS to IRC and browse web pages since at least '96. It's had TCP/IP for quite some time... just it's a complete *bastard* getting it all working correctly. First you have to get your PPP working, then your TCP/IP stack loaded and then finally you have to load your single network application such as an IRC client.

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact there are DOS-based routers and firewals, one of our client had one.
It worked, and I gues was secure

Re:os development

[kristaps.kaupe]

No, in 95/98, all they needed to do was click escape at the login box.

This can be disabled in registry.

Re:os development

[kristaps.kaupe]

There *is* a tcp/ip stack for dos.

No, there are tcp/ip stacks for dos. Some of them are TSR programs, some are statically linked libraries. And each of them have unique configuration mechanism. :( (but you can always keep your IP configuration in environment variables and use batchs scripts to create configuration for all required TCP/IP stacks).

I have heard of Dos Routers and firewalls

I know two - IPRoute and Internet Extender (I was using it at home before switching to Linux router).

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, with the use of policies (which can be used on standalone computers), mandatory user profiles and a few tweaks, you can make it that even if the user does press cancel, all he got was a stripped down default account, with no programs on the start menu, no Start->Run, no drives showing in My Computer, control panel neutered, etc. Put in a BIOS password, make sure the computer boots from C: only (so no knoppix, customized bootdisks, etc), and disable the F5/F8 keys during boot (no safemode or boot to DOS) and Win9x almost had reasonable "front door" security.

Of course, if they had a valid password, they could get in and wreck the system very easily (DEL C:\WINDOWS\*.*). But while it didn't compare to an OS with real security, you could configure Win9x so at least the log-in was reasonably secure.

Re:os development

[kristaps.kaupe]

and disable the F5/F8 keys during boot (no safemode or boot to DOS)

AFAIK you can disable Fx keys during start-up of MS-DOS 7 (Win9x), but you can't disable Shift (safe mode command prompt only) and Ctrl (displays boot menu on Win98 [not Win95]).

Re:os development

[Anonymous Coward]

Put in a BIOS password, make sure the computer boots from C: only (so no knoppix, customized bootdisks, etc)

Many (older?) BIOSsss only allow an order to be set. Still, in this case one could open the case, remove the hard disk, put it into another computer...

Re:os development

[vector0319]

To solve your last issue of valid users crippling the system you could use a hardrive protection utility like Centurian Guard. This hardware device puts the harddrive into a "read-only" state allowing anyone to do anything to the contents of the drive. You can even deltree c:\*.*, but once you reboot the contents come back because the users can only actually add/remove data on a temp partition. This works really well with a domain controller (ala samba) so all users data stays safe on a network drive.

DOS is still alive!

[oldosadmin]

DOS is still alive as a great platform for limited uses.

If you need some utilities to go along with freeDOS, try my site, Old Os or if you have problems setting it up try our forums.

Re:DOS is still alive!

[bcrowell]

DOS is still alive as a great platform for limited uses.
Yeah, I still really enjoy playing the Dunjonquest games under TRSDOS on the xtrs emulator. That is the DOS we're talking about, right?

Re:DOS is still alive!

[Anonymous Coward]

> DOS is still alive as a great platform for limited uses.

10 years too late. Might have been more useful 10 years ago when many still used MSDOS.

Re:DOS is still alive!

[kiatoa]

Now there's a site for sore eyes! (yuk, yuk). I haven't seen the green phosphor thing in a long time. Funny timing on this though. Over the weekend I was needing to do some spice simulation and I needed some models. After compiling tclspice (never did get the tcl part to work), apt-getting gschem, gwave etc. I googled for and downloaded some free models off the web. Some of them were dos exe files and an apt-get install dosemu and in seconds I had extracted the files. Both nostalgic and impressive. I didn't try the pspice.exe demo, now that would be impressive if it worked. Please pardon the lame sales attempt in the sig...

Re:DOS is still alive!

[Zork the Almighty]

Are you an idiot ?

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[Anhaedra]

Really? I always thought it meant Disk Operating System.

Why?

[Quasar1999]

Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone? I've seen companies use it on embedded controllers, etc... I don't understand why people can't let it die. If you need something really simple with little overhead, combine your app with the OS features you need. DOS isn't a good fit. If you need DOS for application support, then by God man, start porting the mission critical DOS app...

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS isn't a good fit.

It's a good thing we've got people like yourself to figure out our requirements for us!

"I don't have any suggestions for what you might run your DOS apps on, but you sure as hell shouldn't use DOS!"

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you name a good, FREE real-time OS?

Re:Why?

[pnot]

Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone?

To run DOS applications.

If you need something really simple with little overhead, combine your app with the OS features you need.

What if the OS features I need are, in their entirity, "I need it to run this application"?

DOS isn't a good fit.

It's an excellent fit for DOS applications.

If you need DOS for application support, then by God man, start porting the mission critical DOS app...

Sure thing, as soon as you start paying me to do so.

Seriously, though. If it's not broken, why fix it? Sure, it might be fun to port all those old applications to a modern OS, but who's going to pay for it? If you have a standalone machine already doing *exactly* what you need it to do, reliably, I see no need to start messing with it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it or not, DOS was extremely popular and countless hours have been spent learning to use it and develop applications for it. There are many established development tools and a huge amount of people experienced in developing for DOS. And to be honest, it's not a bad environment at all for single-tasking applications. It's bare-bones enough without asking developers to code their own OS routines from scratch. I don't see DOS going away anytime soon.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

look at him laugh about his trolling

Re:Why?

[gl4ss]

* If you need something really simple with little overhead, combine your app with the OS features you need. *

huh, isn't that the point of using DOS? having the os features you need(fileaccess and whatever) but no overhead?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's not broken, why fix it?

So why is anyone working on DOS? Either it's broken, and should be ported to modern hardware (for obvious reasons), or it's not broken, in which case no one should be working on it. If people are working on FreeDOS, then it must be broken.

People using DOS need to drive their avanti to the store and buy a $50 computer that will run a modern version of Linux or Windows.

Re:Why?

[croddy]

RTLinux?

Re:Why?

[pnot]

So why is anyone working on DOS?

Let's be specific here: people are working on FreeDOS, a reimplementation of MS-DOS. As has been pointed out elsewhere on this thread, it is stable and useful but not yet a complete reimplementation, which is why people are still working on it.

Either it's broken...

"Broken" is not really the same as "still under development". A great number of perfectly stable programs are still being actively developed.

... and should be ported to modern hardware...

Eh? You've lost me now. AFAIK FreeDOS runs fine on modern hardware.

or it's not broken, in which case no one should be working on it.

I think the developers are free to work on what they like in their own time... how were you planning to stop them?

People using DOS need to drive their avanti to the store and buy a $50 computer that will run a modern version of Linux or Windows.

... but still won't run the mission-critical DOS applications they were running in the first place? (Unless, of course, they install FreeDOS on their new $50 machines.) That would be a case of "if it's not broken, then break it", I think.

Re:Why?

[schwaang]

Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone?

That post wasn't flamebait - it's a reasonable question.

Here's one example -- Steve Gibson released a new version of his SpinRite hard disk test/recovery tool. grc.com It uses FreeDOS so you can boot from a floppy and test every sector.

[I haven't tried the product, just noting one relevant modern use of DOS.]

Re:Why?

[mcrbids]

Seriously, though. If it's not broken, why fix it? Sure, it might be fun to port all those old applications to a modern OS, but who's going to pay for it? If you have a standalone machine already doing *exactly* what you need it to do, reliably, I see no need to start messing with it.

I use FreeDOS to run quicken via SSH in an xterm on Linux. It works well, too!

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Why on earth would anyone want to use a DOS clone

Well we use MS-DOS 6.22 every single day. It's the only way to do x86 HW validation.

Yes it sucks and I hate it. But no more modern OS does the job. I'm sure other people have their reasons as well.

If your reason is nostalgia, get a life. DOS sucks.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

> If your reason is nostalgia, get a life.

The whole reason for the existance of nostalgia IS life. As in your life-experiences and the things you were exposed to and now fondly remember. Personally I will have a (Free)DOS partition on my drive alongside Slackware Linux for a long-time to come. While it's obviously not my primary environment every once in a while I just like booting into it and play a round of games or mess with Norton Utilities (why can't Linux fsck have such a nice n/curses visual pesentation?). Yes, I could do this through DOSEmu but that's not the point. I wanna be "in it" like back then...booting up and the whole bit.
That being said, I found FreeDOS to be amazingly powerful for a DOS system and Linux/UNIX people will find many utilities and commands work (yes, you have ls).
Keep up the good work guys and *please* release the full b9 already...:-)

No I didn't RTFA

[servognome]

I guess posting your website on /. counts as a Free Denial of Service(FreeDOS) attack?

The "About FreeDos" Page before it gets /.ed

[bairy]

FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system.

FreeDOS was previously known as "Free-DOS" and originally as "PD-DOS." For a little trip down memory lane: In 1994, I was a physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Most of my work for school had been done using DOS - writing programs, dialing up to the university computer, network, analysing lab data, etc. I really loved DOS; I did everything with it. I had a '386 desktop system in my dorm room and an XT laptop that I would carry around with me to do work "on the go".

I liked the simplicity that DOS offered. As a DOS user, you have the equivalent of 'root' access on your computer. Anything that you want to do on the PC is possible. Nothing is really stopping you, other than hardware limitations. I found that this additional degree of freedom was nice to have, although since I worked in both environments (UNIX and DOS) I tended to write programs that stuck to "safe areas" that worked on both platforms. DOS was great.

But that year, there was an announcement that Microsoft would stop support for DOS, that a new version of Windows was going to be released that completely removed DOS from the picture. Of course, this was Windows 95, and it still did have DOS, but at that time we all had the vision that Microsoft was trying to kill our favorite operating system. Everyone was pretty shocked. We didn't want to be forced to use Windows, which completely removes the command line. In DOS, everything is done on the command line, and a true command line "guru" can do amazing things there. In Windows, you are stuck with the mouse, and if the menus don't let you do something, it pretty much can't be done. So things were looking pretty bleak. We were all very upset about Microsoft's decision to ditch the DOS platform.

Then, I saw a discussion thread on the DOS groups asking "hey, why doesn't someone write their own free version of DOS?" Remember, this was about three years after Linus Torvalds announced his work on the Linux kernel, and by 1993 Linux had shown that free software can achieve incredible results. So in 1994, the suggestion that we could write our own free version of DOS, and give it away with the source code so others could work with it and improve it, really didn't sound all that far-fetched.

Unfortunately, no one seemed to pick up the ball. The idea sort of sat there, waiting. I didn't have much experience in writing C or Assembly programs (most of my analytical work in physics was limited to FORTRAN) but I had written some C programs. So I sat down one weekend and hacked out code for a bunch of DOS file utilities. I posted what I had done to the DOS newsgroups, and announced that I intended to form a group on the Internet to write our own free version of DOS.

I took the opportunity to fix some things. There are some things about what Microsoft did with DOS that do irk me. The biggest is that MS-DOS commands lack options, not that there are lots of MS-DOS commands anyway. I wanted to have more powerful tools than what MS-DOS provided me with. So I hacked some of my own. (I wasn't a strong C programmer at the time, so this wasn't very beautiful code.)

There were several "beta" pre-release packages of my stuff:

• 0.10 - contained a few basic utilities, just to get the easy ones out of the way: clear (like CLS), echo, more, rem, type, ver, wait (like Pause)
• 0.11 - added date, test (some do-nothing test program), time
• 0.12 - added choose
• 0.13 - fixes and some cleanup
• 0.14 - added tee (like UNIX 'tee')
• 0.15 - added bgc (sets background color), fgc (sets foreground color), man (like UNIX 'man')
• ...
• 1.0 - clear replaced by cls, man replaced by help, wait replaced by pause, bgc and fgc moved into cls. Added del, find, reboot, unix2dos.

Afte

Re:The "About FreeDos" Page before it gets /.ed

[Reziac]

Another thing, if you need a system that runs 24/7/365 for years on end, DOS will do it. So long as no ill-mannered app takes it down, DOS will keep running, and running... my old 286, which ran DOS6.0 and worked its little ass off, had a stretch with only two reboots in FIVE YEARS, both times due to hardware issues (once the HD needed a fresh low-level format, the other time the power was out longer than the UPS's capacity).

All reasons why "I will give up DOS when they pry my cold dead computer from around it!"

Don't trust those guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Their project is basically a 16-bit wrapper of FreeWINDOWS product.

emu

[areve]

FreeDOS is a operating system I've only ever used in emu's bochs, qemu etc... Happy birthday FreeDOS!

Re:emu

[bhtooefr]

You'll also find it on =80486 webservers. And yes, they do exist.

Re:emu

[bhtooefr]

AHH, that was supposed to be =<80486, not =80486...

Re:oh

[ari_j]

Yeah...BSD is dead. DOS is alive and kicking. ;)

FreeDOS will also work......

[tarquin_fim_bim]

",in DOS emulators,"

And produce silk purses from sows ears?

Does it play games?

[jakel2k]

The real question is does it play those old games. I miss SimAnt, SimCity (the DOS Versions), Warcraft, Leisure Suite Larry, Space Quest, Heros Quest, Police Quest, Kings Quest and all the other old dos games of the time. Heaven forbid running these on MS-DOS.

Re:Does it play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's basically what I use it for (FreeSCI does a good job too, though). Good luck trying to find support for your sound card, though :\. Most sound cards released within the past 55 years won't even have SB-Pro emulation drivers for DOS.

Re:Does it play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the old Sierra DOS games *still* work under Windows XP, though many others from around the same period no longer do.

Re:Does it play games?

[Mesaeus]

That's where you use DOSBox, a DOS emulator (mainly) for old games. It doesn't play all dos games yet but every release gets better.

Re:Does it play games?

[vadim_t]

Runs Descent, Descent2, Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall 2097 for me. Although DOS4GW doesn't work on it, but you can replace the extender with the Zurenava DOS Extender, for example.

The site's in Russian, but it's simple to use. You run it on the game executable to replace the extender it uses. After that it works fine. Some games seem to lock up on exit on my laptop, but everything works fine during play, so it shouldn't be a huge problem.

Re:Does it play games?

[jakel2k]

Windows??? That isn't even worth a reply. (I would much rather prefer a non MS solution since I would like to stay pure and inncocent.....errr..... kinda)

Re:Does it play games?

[TTK Ciar]

Games is why I use FreeDOS on my laptop (dual-boot with Slackware 9.1).

What I have on it now, which works: Boloball, Bridge, Checkkers, Civilization, Hexjump, Texas Hold'em, Battle for Atlantis, VGA Joust, Larn, Bugs, Othello, Starcon-1, Wari, WarZone, XCom, XCom Terror from the Deep.

What doesn't work: Warcraft-2.

What I have somewhere but haven't installed/tried under FreeDOS yet: Warcraft-1, Descent-I/II/III, Quake

-- TTK

Re:Does it play games?

[dosius]

For the most part yes. It's quite compatible now. When I first started using FreeDOS, not even QuickBasic ran right, but now it's hard to find - apart from Windows 3 - software that doesn't run on FreeDOS that does run on MS-DOS.

Moll.

Re:Does it play games?

[dosius]

DOSBOX only does 286. There are a good number of DOS games that need a 386. (My favorite, Wolfenstein 3-D, isn't one of them; it runs just fine on a 286. I actually use DOSBOX to test my hacks on Wolf3D.)

Moll.

Re:Does it play games?

[gotr00t]

OMG where has this been all my life! This totally kicks VMware's ass when it comes to running old games!

Re:Does it play games?

[tyrotyro]

AGDI have remade Kings Quest One and Two in VGA modes with voice and music packs.
Check it out at http://www.agdinteractive.com

Awesome stuff!

Re:Does it play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr... DOSBOX Does run 386/486 games well. I've personally run Master of Magic, Pirates! Gold, Zone66, OMF 2097, Ravenloft and Ravenloft II, and Wing Commander Privateer under it quite wonderfully.

Re:Does it play games?

[liquidsin]

Is that why Starcontrol 2 plays so damn slow when I use DOSBox under win2k? (or some DOS emu on gentoo)

Re:Does it play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to look at The Ur-quan Masters

Re:Does it play games?

[cheesybagel]

Warcraft II works just fine in DOSBox. At least it did last time I tried it.

Re:Does it play games?

[lvd]

Freedos also runs great inside the FreeBSD 'doscmd' tool (comes standard with the install).

doscmd(1) emulates just enough of the bios in userspace on bsd to do useful things, like running that old TurboPascal 3.0 suite, and creating dos-bootable filesystem images (ever had to find a way to produce the effect of format /s c: or sys c: on a real OS?)

if you recompile it with X11 support, you can nearly play lemmings!

Re:Does it play games?

[Reziac]

Note also that the Causeway DOS extender was released into the public domain a while back; this was the preferred extender per folk in the Watcom newsgroups.

http://www.devoresoftware.com/freesource/codefaq .h tm#Restrictions (beware the /. space)

Re:Does it play games?

[Nexx]

noooo. It does 386 real and protected modes too.

DOS Magazine

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember first reading about FreeDOS in DOS Magazine(?) back in 1996. It was old school even then, but I downloaded it and did some beta testing....or was it alpha testing? My first version was Alpha 5. heh

Who the hell would want free DoSing...

[jakel2k]

oh wait a sec.....

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[Anonymous Coward]

It originally meant Dirty Operating System before being purchased by MS.

But why so many DOS emulators???

It turns 10 today...

[dillon_rinker]

...but when will it turn 1.0?

Re:It turns 10 today...

[Trolling4Dollars]

Please mod parent as Funny. Damn I wish I had mod points!

Re:It turns 10 today...

[tverbeek]

It's actually pretty darn close.

Re:It turns 10 today...

[kristaps.kaupe]

When TODO list will be completed.

Re:It turns 10 today...

[Jim Hall]

...but when will it turn 1.0?

To quote another poster here on slashdot:

FD has been quite useable for many years. The fact its not reached 1.0 is mainly due to debates on optional features needed to call it '1.0', and not related at all to its stablity or useablity.

Re:It turns 10 today...

[Anonymous Coward]

DIE MOTHERFUCKING BITCHES!!!!! The mods who pulled the parent comment down to Troll 0 were completely unfair. FreeDOS hasn't made it to a 1.0 release yet. FreeDOS is now 10 years old. It's extremely funny that it reached a one and a zero (as in ten) in terms of age, but not yet in terms of version number. You fucking assholes have no sense of fucking humour. Whoever you are, I hope you get stabbed to death and mutilated in real life and completely slaughtered for all eternity in metamoderation. I hate people who don't know what real humour is. Assholes. FOAD.

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the name comes from QDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System. Seriously.

Legality of APIs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be curious to know if Microsoft (or Novell -- PC-DOS) owns copyrights or patents on any of the DOS APIs. They're all implemented as interrupt 21h calls I beleive (its been a while), so nothing really has a name (as far as trademarks or patents go). Curious none-the-less, though.

Re:Legality of APIs

[IvyKing]

I'd be curious to know if Microsoft (or Novell -- PC-DOS) owns copyrights or patents on any of the DOS APIs. They're all implemented as interrupt 21h calls I beleive (its been a while), so nothing really has a name (as far as trademarks or patents go). Curious none-the-less, though.

Considering that the original API's were based on CP/M, I don't think M$ would have much of a leg to stand on. In addition, Seattle Computer still retained some rights to DOS after it was sold to M$. Thirdly, back in the 80's, M$ allowed a couple of the big guys to sell their own versions - most notably Compaq with version 3.31 (first DOS to support more than 32 MB per logical partition).

Re:Legality of APIs

[Flexagon]

Well, not an API but a data structure, there apparently is for FAT, but it is under review.

Re:Legality of APIs

[X3J11]

The only rights to DOS Seattle Computer Products retained was the right to sell copies with hardware ("Expert C Programming", Lindauer, pg.169). The licensed versions of DOS were OEM versions (using the OAK - OEM Adaptation Kit). Basically, they were just branded with the "big guys" name and copyright, and in some cases included code to contend with non-100% IBM PC compatible hardware.

Re:Legality of APIs

[bhtooefr]

Novell? PC-DOS was IBM. You mean DR-DOS, which is the latest version of CP/M, and is now at 8.0, and is now owned by DeviceLogics (7.01 was the last version by Novell - it was sold to Caldera, who is now known as SCO, Caldera spun Lineo off, and Lineo got it, and then DeviceLogics finally updated it.)

Re:Legality of APIs

[IntlHarvester]

In 1986, Seattle Computer was going out of business and planned to sell it's right to print DOS to a large vendor like Compaq. This lead to a lawsuit, and eventually a settlement where Microsoft bought them out for about $1 Mill. ("Hard Drive", Wallace & Erickson, 1992)

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[haakoneide]

If one talks a little slobby, it can actually sound like "toilet" in Norwegian.

In other news...

[oldosadmin]

BSD is dying (netcraft...)
MS is dying
Sun is dying
Ad nauseum...

Re:In other news...

[MrRuslan]

Well I wasnt serious in the post so no need for sarcasm :P

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh. We don't get that here.

FreeDOS for BIOS flashing

[jedrek]

I use FreeDOS quite (well, relatively speaking) often, but only for one thing - flashing my motherboard BIOS. I got rid of floppy drives long ago, after my last one died back in the previous century, and haven't looked back. Usually, I'll download the FreeDOS ISO, inject the drivers into it and burn it to a CD-RW. Then just boot up from the CD, flash the BIOS and I'm good.

Re:FreeDOS for BIOS flashing

[Anonymous Coward]

I also have used FreeDOS to flash the BIOS of my Inspiron 8100 laptop. I only run Debian GNU/Linux on the laptop -- no Windows or MS or PC DOS. However, the BIOS upgrade utilities need a DOS. FreeDOS worked great for what I needed.

Re:FreeDOS for BIOS flashing

[bhtooefr]

Apparently Asus distributes an emergency disc with a BIOS image, and flashing tools, that runs FreeDOS. I know this because FreeDOS has a big warning on their front page that there's a problem with Asus' copy of it - basically, it'll fark your MBR if you try to install FreeDOS from it.

Re:FreeDOS for BIOS flashing

[DrHyde]

DOS is very useful for bootstrapping a more modern OS. For instance, I used it to get Linux onto my Toshiba Libretto. I had to go through those contortions because the Libretto only has one PCMCIA slot (and PCMCIA network cards can't netboot) and uses a bizarre PCMCIA floppy which isn't recognised by anything other than the Libretto's BIOS (and so isn't available in Linux).

Also, if you rememberthe good old days of Netware 3 and 4, you'll know that they used DOS (in their case DR-DOS) as a boot loader.

I actually installed FreeDOS in VMWare recently

[jbellis]

Unfortunately without VMWaare's fancy graphics drivers that don't work when the guest OS is DOS it was too slow to play the old game I was interested in (MOO 1).

(But, DOSBox worked once I played with frameskip!)

I think it's cool that we have these options today.

Parts of FreeDOS will live Forever

[Anonymous Coward]

ReactOS uses a 32 bit port of freedos command.com as a cmd.exe replacement. It is 1000x better than that broken POS Microsoft ships with Windows that they call a shell.

10 years in the making!

[ljavelin]

I find it humorous that it's still in Beta after 10 years of development.

I'm not poo-pooing the effort, but you have to admit that that's a long time before declaring 1.0!

Re:10 years in the making!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the aim of the FreeDOS team was to make a MS DOS v1.0 compatible system then they would have had a non-beta OS in a relatively short time. However, their goal was to make an OS that was comparable to the current incarnation of MS DOS. How long did MS DOS take to get to all the functionality it has today in v6.22? About 14 years.

Re:10 years in the making!

[X3J11]

It's not that funny... Windows has been around for 20 years and Microsoft still hasn't managed to make it decent.

Re:10 years in the making!

[chgros]

I find it humorous that it's still in Beta after 10 years of development.

I'm not poo-pooing the effort, but you have to admit that that's a long time before declaring 1.0!
GNU/Hurd is at 0.2 right now...

1.0 isnt a magic number

[nurb432]

FD has been quite useable for many years. The fact its not reached 1.0 is mainly due to debates on optional features needed to call it '1.0', and not related at all to its stablity or useablity.

Free compilers and more

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need development tools and utilities, have a a look at DJ Delorie Software.

He's best known for DJGPP C++ compiler for DOS. (djgpp a special version of gcc)

Dos is Dead

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Remember - Bill Gates said dos was dead? //ducks

Re:Dos is Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody will never need more than 640K.

- Bill Gates

Re:Dos is Dead

[Anhaedra]

That only shows that he is a retard though...

Re:Dos is Dead

[I. Appel]

DOS is dead Bill Gates
Bill Gates is dead DOS

Dell and FreeDOS

[ed1park]

Funny that this should come up as I only noticed yesterday that Dell sells systems with FreeDOS now.

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare .a spx/desktops_n?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

This is great as I've been buying the cheapest SC servers to avoid the microsoft tax. With prices starting at $319, i can now afford to buy the 20 or so systems i was planning on for the business. nice

Re:Dell and FreeDOS

[Jim Hall]

Dell has offered FreeDOS on their systems for a while now. Here are some links: 15 Jan 2004 and Aug 9 2003. Slashdot also ran a story about FreeDOS on Dells before.

Re:Hooray!

[gl4ss]

huh? I was quite happy that it was on the driver cd that came with computer I was installing an OS on to.

since I had stupidly expected that xp would be smart enough to pick up scsi/sata drivers from a cd and not only from a floppy...

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, Dirty Operating System was a joke. The term "Disk Operating System" goes back to the 60s.

Will it run bash?

[mangu]

I have developed many systems running in DOS. A TSR will do pretty good when task scheduling isn't a big problem. But I do miss a good command interpreter. It's much quicker to write "ls *", rather than setting up the structures and calling the functions that read a directory in C. Wait... Is there Perl for freeDOS?

Re:Will it run bash?

[Pharmboy]

I have developed many systems running in DOS. A TSR will do pretty good when task scheduling isn't a big problem. But I do miss a good command interpreter. It's much quicker to write "ls *", rather than setting up the structures and calling the functions that read a directory in C. Wait... Is there Perl for freeDOS?

Then just use Linux, or if you strongly prefer Windows, use Cygwin. I use both equally. Perl is a standard package in Cygwin (have to select it, tho) or you can install Perl in Windows with several different binary ports.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Cygwin (cygwin.com), its a Unix like environment for Windows. It takes up one directory and if you put the ../bin directory in your path, you can use the utilities in a Win9x/XP command prompt. Its called as a batch file, and its like SSHing into your own machine. it has a virtual directory structure that gives you full access to your whole drive or its own / structure under its windows path (safe), and most of the useful Unix utilities.

The setup program lets you install Perl, GCC, plus other languages and compilers, and even an Xserver, although my luck with that is not so good. Even if you are a Windows only user, its a great way to get introduced to a fairly powerful shell, with several options like tch and bash, without the problems of a dual boot.

It is NOT "Linux in Windows", its a set of APIs to be able to compile and run many Linux programs from source, with just a few mouse clicks to install the most common programs. Find it here. It's Free.

Re:Will it run bash?

[mangu]

Until I can get a Linux-in-a-chip system, that won't do for me. I'm looking from the hobbyist point of view, a system I can build with a dozen or so chips. I have lots of leftovers from the early days, things like 8088 CPU's and TTL chips. DOS is fine for building small interfaces that can communicate with a larger computer. Of course, I could use PIC's for that, but then what would I do with my collection of old chips?

Re:Will it run bash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes there is perl (of sorts). Search for DOSPerl on CPAN. I'm not sure of the name of the site but if you Google for DJGPP and Delorie you can find a bash shell that will run on DOS.

Re:Will it run bash?

[kristaps.kaupe]

Yes, there is Perl port to DOS, as well as bash port. Unfotunatelly, for 386+ only. Check out DJGPP project. Also there was project called GNUish to port some GNU apps to 16-bits.

Re:Will it run bash?

[Anonymous Coward]

The bash.exe from the Free Software Foundation's "GNU Tools for MSDOS" cd and book should work just fine, as long as you have a memory manager.

I know someone who ran the FSF's bash.exe through an exe-to-com converter, and then named it command.com. It worked, and viruses which typically depend on jumping to particular place in command.com to run something now failed. However, I believe Word Perfect 5.1 also would not run.

Re:Will it run bash?

[oldosadmin]

THAT is awesome. Post how to do that on my forum :)

Re:Will it run bash?

[nutsy]

You're looking for a system on a chip, but you want to use bash?! Uh... you might want to consider re-weighing your priorities there: bash is huge, over 460KB on my personal system. You might also want to try looking into 4DOS.

Re:Will it run bash?

[Pharmboy]

if you actually read his comment, he wanted a command line environment, not bash. Bash is just one of many command line invironments. _I_ suggested bash, not fully understanding he wants something that will run on 8088s, which bash is not likely to do since Linux is not easily ported to anything less than a 386. (mmu)

Can it run Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is FreeDOS capable of running Windows 3.1 / 3.11 / 95 / 98?

What about the Windows 3.1 feature that gave a non-fatal error at startup when PC-DOS was used?

Re:Can it run Windows?

[phorm]

I dunno about freeDOS, but DOSBox can run 3.1 with some tweaking

Re:Can it run Windows?

[dosius]

Not yet. I have run 3.00a in 286 mode, however, but it's highly crashprone. I think a lot of the devs don't think it's worth the bother aiming for Win3.x compatibility, but if it don't run Windows 3.1x, it ain't 100% compatible...

Moll.

Re:Can it run Windows?

[Anhaedra]

Here is a link to the official Dosbox site. link

Re:Can it run Windows?

[pnot]

Hell, who needs Windows when we've got SEAL? ;-)

Re:Can it run Windows?

[Ch_Omega]

"Hell, who needs Windows when we've got SEAL? ;-)"

To run old Win16 programs? Can SEAL do that?

Stupid Linux question???

[MisanthropicProgram]

Hey, has anyone tried making this a DOS session on Linux? That would be sooo cool!!!

Re:Stupid Linux question???

[croddy]

FreeDOS will run on DOSEmu on Linux.

Re:Stupid Linux question???

[dosius]

DOSEMU uses FreeDOS to do just that.

Moll.

Re:Stupid Linux question???

[Mr.Radar]

They already did, it's called DOSBox.

DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why some people dislike DOS.. Is it just because you teens have not ever used it, or your Linux/WinXP is so much cooler? Whatever, I don't care. You still have to use DOS to upgrade your motherboard/GPU BIOSes. You know what a BIOS is, do you.. I've even made one!

I just did a bootable 1.44MB FreeDOS floppy that plays mp3/ogg files with MPXplay, and then put it on to a bootable CD-ROM with all the music content I like. Voila, free, open source, standalone car/home/whatever music player which does not need a hard drive (for swapping). Just boot from ATAPI CD-drive and play some tunes, even at your friend's house!

Now try to do that with Linux/Windows/*BSD. I would have if I'd know how to do it. Preferably with a BSD system.

I was looking a player that could play tracker songs (you know, those before mp3s when 80386 and dinosaurs ruled the earth), mp3s and oggs, but no DOS player can do that as far as I know. XTC-Play could do tracker songs and mp3s, but not oggs.

I will eventually put a website of the bootable FreeDOS ogg/mp3 CD project. Maybe post it here..

Re:DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

On a cover CD I got with a PC mag of mine (Atomic MPC, Aussie Mag) they had a full media bootable CD. It was based on knoppix and had support for getting video from networked PC's (ic. wireless) PC tuner, HDD recorder (HDD wasnt needed to run, but it could save stuff to em), play DVD's / SVCD's / the rest of it.

It could be fully loaded to RAM if you had enough, and you could add media to the CD or use a different CD.

It was created for media set top boxes, and having a stuff around on my desktop it looked pretty good.

Im sure if you looked around Knoppix sites there would be something similar online.

Re:DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. I got a gui operating system and shell akin to modern linux along with a compiler and files onto two Amiga 880k disks a few decades ago. DOS never stood a chance of competing with that.

Re:DOS is small!

[Trailer Trash]

I just did a bootable 1.44MB FreeDOS floppy that plays mp3/ogg files with MPXplay, and then put it on to a bootable CD-ROM with all the music content I like. Voila, free, open source, standalone car/home/whatever music player which does not need a hard drive (for swapping). Just boot from ATAPI CD-drive and play some tunes, even at your friend's house!

Now try to do that with Linux/Windows/*BSD.

I did it three years ago:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/mjbd/

Re:DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, that's the best "checkmate" post I've ever seen!!!

Re:DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I am sure Knoppix would run on my machine with 16MB RAM and a Pentium MMX 233 processor underclocked to 100MHz to avoid heat problems.

Just as OpenBSD would install in case I have less than 20MB of memory and no swap space available.

And it tooks only 33% CPU time to play mp3/ogg with that machine.

Re:DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it do Ogg playback? Mine does.

Can you fit a tracker module player in it too? I can. More than 720KB is still free from 1.44MB.

Does your player support IR remote controllers or LCD displays or do you have to code them yourself? I don't. And in case I have to modify something,
everyone can modify DOS sources. I'd hate to make some custom Linux device drivers.

See, it's a matter of taste. What you can do and makes you happy is different from what I can do and makes me happy :)

( I'll ignore the rant about checkmate, mate.. )

Re:DOS is small!

[Alexis de Torquemada]

You still have to use DOS to upgrade your motherboard/GPU BIOSes.

I had to discover that Asrock's flash utility doesn't work with FreeDOS. :-( Asus worked fine, though.

Re:DOS is small!

[sigaar]

Knoppix would. Not the full on version with KDE 3.x, but some of the smaller knoppix projects would. Especially if it has mmx working for it too, even at 100mz.

Smallinux is a 50mb image - I use it on a 486DX2-66 with 16mb ram. Works fine with blackbox, I can listen to wav files, but I haven't tried mp3 and ogg - not sure if it would be fast enough. I remember my old DX4-100 16mb could just do mp3, but only if I wasn't trying to do anything at the same time.

We also have a 100mhz Pentium (no mmx there yet) notebook running vector linux with XFCE desktop (32mb RAM though). It can play mp3s and oggs fine with about 50% CPU usage while XFCE is running.

Re:DOS is small!

[gazurtoids]

Christ, what an arsehole.

Re:DOS is small!

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that.

Re:DOS is small!

[Zardus]

I love DOS and all, but there's no reason to bash other OSes. Movix does what you describe (plus video), and does it with a much better looking interface.

Re:DOS is small!

[Reziac]

Heh.. I run XTC for DOS not only in DOS but also under Win32. Works fine. It will do tracked music, WAVs, and MP3s with the older type of ID3 tag, but chokes on some newer ones and possibly on VBR. And no one ever accused that PMode DOS extender of stability. Does anyone know what became of the source for XTC-Play for DOS? I'd think with a little capabilities extension and a more stable DPMI host, it could be as good as any modern music app.

Re:DOS is small!

[Trailer Trash]

Not to carry this silliness much further, but can you hit alt-f2 and use a Unix shell while yours plays?

Yeah, we each implemented something slightly different, to each his own. The fact is, though, that I have far more flexibility with a Unix shell and true multitasking environment than you'll ever have with DOS. But, sure, yours plays music and mine plays music.

long way?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've come a long way in 10 years. Today, FreeDOS is ideal for anyone who wants to bundle a version of DOS without having to pay a royalty for use of DOS.

Um, Microsoft kinda' dropped the DOS thing a while ago. Glad to see we've made made it "a long way" -- far enough to be be years in past right about now.

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[Anonymous Coward]

No, "dos" is Swedish for dose.

Another stupid Linux question???

[MisanthropicProgram]

With DOSEmu, do I even need FreeDOS?

Re:Another stupid Linux question???

[jtev]

Yes, dosemu needs a DOS to host. The standard Dos distributed with dosemu is freedos. Next question please.

Free - XP

[uberfruk]

I have decided to embark on a free Windows XP-like operating system. I plan to stick to a traditional Longhorn release time table; so the first release can be expected in the beginning of 2025. Also, I have very little experience coding, so you can expect numerous flaws similar to the ones already present.

Re:Free - XP

[Anonymous Coward]

No - idiot moderators for modding that as 'Interesting'. Fools don't recognize a troll - and a bad one at that - when it walks right up and bites them on their shiny metal asses!!
--
Razzem frazzem fricken fracken grumble grumble...

Re:Free - XP

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy was joking... for fuck's sake!

Re:Free - XP

[saramakos]

In other words you are going for 100% "Feature" compatibility?

Re:Free - XP

[CableModemSniper]

Just in case anyone is interested, I managed to find a link to this guy's project. Damn, uberfruk, you work fast.

Re:Free - XP

[Reziac]

Yes, but with all those features, how do we tell it from the real thing? ;)

Re:Free - XP

[CableModemSniper]

This is going to get modded offtopic but thats ok. Just so you guys know, I was joking, not trolling. Sorry to give the wrong impression (apparently).

Windows on DOS on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've kinda a strange question here...

Is there a way to Windows 3.11 on top
of Linux, short of VMware?

Should a person expect Windows 3.11 to
run on top of DOSemu and FreeDOS?

OR would the original Windows 3.11 +
DOS 5.x be expected to runon top of
DOSemu?

If anyone has a definitive answer, I'd
like to know.

Re:Windows on DOS on Linux?

[iantri]

Short answer: No. Well, maybe if you have a copy of OS/2, but it doesn't really work well.

Re:Windows on DOS on Linux?

[CanadianCrackPot]

I have successfully run DOS 6.0 with Windows 3.0 within a dos emu session. I attempted to install Win 3.1 but I couldn't get it to start up even after downloading a file the DOSemu project reported was necessary. I do admit though that it seemed really wrong to see a Microsoft install screen within what I knew was a Linux system. It also took me way back to oh 9 years or so ago when most things were still text only for me (Excepting games of course).

Re:Windows on DOS on Linux?

[LighthouseJ]

DOSBox really isn't meant to run things too far up the flagpole.

I'd recommend running Bochs for stuff between Windows 3.11 and Windows 98. It's more contained than DOSBox but it's nice and free and does a decent job. It works better in Linux than Windows too. Bochs rochs the sochs. (sorry, I just had to.)

Re:Windows on DOS on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Oh you want specifics? Well first of all, get QEmu and install it. Now install the DOS of your choice, but sadly not FreeDOS as Windows is too unstable on it. Install Windows 3.11 on top of DOS.

Dunno about running it on DOSemu or DOSBOX. If you replaced FreeDOS with MS-DOS or PC-DOS on DOSemu it might work..who knows?

Re:Windows on DOS on Linux?

[aitor.sm]

Mind the many different "modes" in which this DOS/DPMI app. called Microsoft Windows can be run on.

(1) In the "real mode" (until Windows 3.0), with no protected mode at all, I ignore if it currently runs under FreeDOS.

(2) In the "standard mode" (until Windows 3.1), that is, using the DOSX DPMI server and extender, it runs up to bugs (or at least, there were some bugs time ago preventing Windows from running properly)

(3) In the "386 enhanced mode", that is, using Microsoft's VMM (a 32-bit OS and PC virtualizer), it doesn't run, because of technical reasons involving inter VMM-DOS communications that are not implemented (and are not likely to be implemented in the nearby future).

Re:Windows on DOS on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeDOS, as DOSBox, has problems with
386 enhanced mode of Windows. The newest
version which has STANDARD mode is 3.1,
so you will not be able to run any newer
than 3.1 for now.

MS / PC / DR DOS do run Windows in 386
enhanced mode, but even that will not
work in DOSEMU because it would need
ring 0 protected mode access...

ANYWAY, something called WinOS2 seems
to solve that. It replaces parts of
Windows and makes it more compatible to
DOSEMU and probably also FreeDOS (originally
this was meant to make Windows work inside
OS/2, and you get it as part of OS/2 I guess).

A much better way to run Windows programs
in Linux is using WINE. It can pretend
being any Windows from 3.0 to XP (at least).

You can also run Windows - probably even
Windows 9x - in Bochs(.sf.net), which
emulates a whole PC including the CPU.

DOSEMU only emulates the I/O devices,
which means that programs inside DOSEMU
have only limited access to protected mode
- the main reason why not even MS DOS will
make Windows 3.11 386 enhanced mode work
in DOSEMU without the OS/2 stuff.

On the other hand, this means that BOCHS
is much slower than DOSEMU.

Eric (the FDAPM one...)

DOSbox

[phorm]

DOSBox seems aimed more at games than general applications, which seems to explain why some of the nicer points of freeDOS (such as printing/netprint support) don't seem to work as well/easily in dosbox. Easier to setup though, and good for some of the stuff that dosEMU doesn't handle as well yet.

Re:DOSBox

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually DosBOX can run pretty much anything (at least if you have 10GHz cpu). Heck, I finally managed to see Optic Nerve with it.

Cool!

[MisanthropicProgram]

I'm still waiting for :
FreeAS400
FreeOS360
FreeOS/2 (dammit!)
FreeLinux - Oh wait. Duh! My Bad. I got a little carried away here. Nothing to see.....Move along....

Re:Cool!

[iggymanz]

Free os/360? wait no more (run it on the Hercules emulator on your pc) Some FreeNeXTSTEP would rock too!

Re:Cool!

[McDutchie]

Some FreeNeXTSTEP would rock too!

It isn't quite an OS, but GNUStep comes closest to being a FreeNeXTSTEP...

Re:Cool!

[ln -sf head ass]

Free OS360?!

//JOB BEAVIS
//EXEC PGM=IEBGENER
//SYSUT1 DD *
W00T!
/*
//SYSUT2 DD SYSOUT=A
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=A
//

Re:Cool!

[RocketSHE]

Thank you for dredging up *that* old memory! Now I'm going to have JCL nightmares for weeks! One of these days I'm going to burn those old punched cards in the basement.

Re:Cool!

[ln -sf head ass]

Sorry :).

Re:News Flash

[ovoskeuiks]

Try to kill it? nobody should try to kill an operating system or any other piece of software If it still has a valid use then people will still use it.

Re:DOS is QDOS

[swordfishBob]

... only the name "quick & dirty operating system" wasn't so marketable. Let's not call it "quick" :-)

Opposite approach to Windows NT ("New Technology")

Thanks to FreeDOS

[Tuqui]

I still use it for old hardware drivers install and setting tools.

Thank you

[xYoni69x]

I recently took an assembly programming college course. The course covered Intel x86 assembly and development in the DOS environment (DOS interrupts, etc.). (Yeah, it's outdated. Oh well.)

The DOS emulator in Windows is not especially great. Particularly, direct access to the video buffer is not always emulated correctly on my machine, the timer interrupt is not precise (not well-synchronized with other processes in the background), and a few other annoyances.

Instead of fighting and arguing with Windows, I took my old unused Pentium 1 and booted into FreeDOS on it, after making an ODIN (a one-disk distribution of FreeDOS) boot floppy. I did my work on that computer, and the emulation was perfect.

Thanks to the FreeDOS project!

(Now I gotta figure out what to do with that P1... I think I almost have to install Linux on it, being a Slashdot poster and all.)

Re:Thank you

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a slashdot poster you have to turn it into a web server, submit a story about it and then watch it melt as it gets slashdotted!

Game Platform too...

[MisanthropicProgram]

I can think of some games that were written in DOS that would work great on FreeDOS.
Some of these games have their own grphics engines that work (speedy) better than Windows.

Re:Game Platform too...

[Jim Hall]

I can think of some games that were written in DOS that would work great on FreeDOS. Some of these games have their own grphics engines that work (speedy) better than Windows.

Yes, FreeDOS does work great as a game platform. At one point, I started a FreeDOS for Gamers page, but I haven't finished it (need to add EMM386 info.) Some of that info may help you.

OT, but may be good to know.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious - how do you "inject" files into an ISO image? Pardon my ignorance.

Re:OT, but may be good to know.

[Jagasian]

He probably mounts the ISO image file with loopback, and then you can inject files into the image as if it was any other directory/folder.

Re:OT, but may be good to know.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Linux and BSD you can mount the image as a filesystem and write files to it. There are also windows utilities available.

Re:OT, but may be good to know.

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't work. ISO9660 is by it's very nature a read-only filesystem, even if it's located on a technically read-write block device like image on hard drive.

[root@xxx root]# mount -o loop,rw blah.iso /mnt/cdrom
[root@xxx root]# cd /mnt/cdrom
[root@xxx cdrom]# touch foo
touch: cannot touch `foo': Read-only file system

Re:OT, but may be good to know.

[jedrek]

I use MagicISO.

Re:OT, but may be good to know.

[Gordonjcp]

Copy the files, then remake the iso. The FreeDOS iso isn't very big.

680 Attack Sub

[MisanthropicProgram]

Can that session run that game?
I'll be really fsking impressed if it does.

Re:680 Attack Sub

[jtev]

Well, I was being sarcastic about the next question remark. I honestly don't know if it does. Probaly doens't in dosemu.

My guess...

[MisanthropicProgram]

On OS/2 for Windows (TM IBM) we hooked into known memory locations that Windows (MS) loaded into. (I wasn't the developer for this. That's why my explaination sucks.) This also explains why when MS added code for "fixes" it broke OS/2 for Windows.
My point is Windows 3.11 probably did the same thing - it just "hooked" into DOS. In other words - the write byte to disk was at 0x3748443 (making this up)

BTW - OS/2 was rewritten for the PPC NOT ported.

Oh shit!

[MisanthropicProgram]

I signed a NDA! Now IBM is going to look up "MisanthropicProgram" in the white pages and send me a cease and desist! Fuck!

Today's dumbish question

[tekiegreg]

How do you determine the "birthday" of a piece of software?

1) When the idea was first thought up?
2) The first diagrams designing key features were released?
3) The first line of what was to become the OS was typed?
4) Launch date of alpha version?
5) Other?

Just a thought...

Re:Today's dumbish question

[JamesP]

How do you determine the "birthday" of a piece of software?

For me it's when they bring the cake and blow the candles...

DOSemu

[dmaxwell]

I've had better luck running games in newer versions of DOSemu. I'm running a 2.4 Ghz PIV and I couldn't get a decent framerate in anything I tried in DOSbox. DOSemu ran almost everything I threw at it acceptably. The biggie was Carmageddon.

I'll keep trying new releases. Either it will improve or I'll come into a machine fast enough to emulate a P75 with it. The following specs seem to cover all the ground needed to play games before the Win95 era began.

Pentium 75
Soundblaster AWE32
32 MB RAM
Trio64/VESA/CGA/EGA graphics

I'd estimate my current setup is closer to a P60 than a P75. The only fly in the ointment with DOSemu is that the OPL2/3 and wavetable stuff of the day may be spotty; you'll get sound effects but good luck with the music.

Re:DOSemu

[Wakkow]

"Either it will improve or I'll come into a machine fast enough to emulate a P75 with it."

Or find an old P75 in the trash and use it to play those games...

Re:DOSemu

[dmaxwell]

Or find an old P75 in the trash and use it to play those games...

Ah, but space is at a premium. When you have a wife and kid and don't live in a big place, there is only room for one machine. The emulator doesn't take up space and isn't old cranky hardware that will have to be maintained.

Re:DOSemu

[bhtooefr]

Here's what I've got in my MAIN system:

Pentium 233 MMX
ESS ES1868 ISA
96MB RAM
nVidia TNT2 M64 32MB PCI (no, that wasn't stock, stock was some Cirrus Logic card and a Voodoo I)

Why not just run a P75, AWE32, 32MB RAM, and a Trio64?

First release

[wantedman]

First public release is the best birthday of a piece of software.

Mainly because every programmer has 6 ~ 8 programs that have been at least mostly thought out in their heads.

Yes you can

[Anonymous Coward]

I run Windows 3.11 on top of my latest Mandrake install using DOSBOX. It'll run lotsa old games as well, though a nifty PC helps somewhat.

In other news

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Pong is about to turn 30. Works since the first release and never gives bigger headaches to its users than the inherently necessary to escape the ghosts.

I know, off-topic, but someone already took my FreeDoS joke and I had to post something.

Hm. What about the GPL'd MS-DOS 7.10?

[Illbay]

While there are many free operating systems out there, no other free DOS-compatible operating system exists.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "free," but MS-DOS 7.10 was released (by Microsoft, of all evil empires) under the GNU Public License.

It's about as good a DOS as you'll find--and installs much more readily (and with a bunch of neat-o options) than FreeDOS, at least in my experience.

I always stick a little 30MB partition at the beginning of the first HD on my Linux systems and install MS-DOS 7.10 there so I can update hardware BIOSes, etc.

Re:Hm. What about the GPL'd MS-DOS 7.10?

[kristaps.kaupe]

but MS-DOS 7.10 was released (by Microsoft, of all evil empires) under the GNU Public License.

Where did you get that MS-DOS 7.10 is released under GNU GPL?

Re:Hm. What about the GPL'd MS-DOS 7.10?

[absurdist]

from the webpage... MS-DOS 7.10 is the best and the most up-to-date version of MS-DOS in the world, and it's also the most powerful, useful and high-performance DOS today (besides GNU GPLed FreeDOS). Thanks Microsoft! BESIDES GNU GPLED FREEDOS. NOWHERE on the page does it say that MS-DOS is released under the GPL. As if Bill would actually give anything away.

Re:Hm. What about the GPL'd MS-DOS 7.10?

[Bob Nugget]

MS-DOS 7.10 isn't an illegal hack - you can find it on the Windows 98 SE/ME install disc somewhere in the extras folder. Windows 95/8/ME discs also contain a version of Windows 3.11 used in the installer, which are stored in one of the cab files (precopy.cab or something, i don't remember).

Depends if you can be bothered to install it like these guys or not...

Emulators? Not VirtualPC

[Trillan]

Didn't work in VirtualPC last time I tried it (early February).

Re:Emulators? Not VirtualPC

[xC0000005]

Works fine on vpc on my machine. I captured the FreeDos ISO and booted right up, got warcraft working immediately. Good stuff.

Re:Emulators? Not VirtualPC

[Trillan]

Is it a p articular build? It crashed the emulator on mine.

Re:Emulators? Not VirtualPC

[xC0000005]

VPC 2004 here. What version did you try it on?

Re:Emulators? Not VirtualPC

[Trillan]

Virtual PC 6.1.1. I wasn't aware VPC 2004 had shipped yet...

64 bit support

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how freedos will deal with 64 bit CPUs. I just read that Intel's 64bit CPU will no longer support virtual x86 sessions anymore. So this means no more DOS. Will FreeDOS deal with it?

Re:64 bit support

[kristaps.kaupe]

I wonder how freedos will deal with 64 bit CPUs. I just read that Intel's 64bit CPU will no longer support virtual x86 sessions anymore. So this means no more DOS. Will FreeDOS deal with it?

Intel IA64 chips can emulate x86, AMD64 (and Intel's clones) supports x86 natively. Unless you enter long mode, it will act as fast 16-bit/32-bit CPU.

Beta 9 would have been a nice party gift

[jensend]

The last time FreeDOS had a real distribution release was two years ago. Looking forward to 1.0 is all well and good, but a Beta 9 (sans the ugly graphical installer of the latest "we'll call it RC even though we would never consider actually releasing this as B9" releases, perhaps?) would certainly be nice.

USB Support?

[Futurepower(R)]

Anyone have USB support for DOS?

Re:USB Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case you're serious, someone did write a USB disk driver for DOS. Google it.

Re:USB Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing stopping you from implementing a USB stack on DOS, aside from complexity. There have been a few DOS-based source code USB stacks for sale, and they're mostly very, very expensive if you want to purchase one. Then you just have to write drivers for everything.

Re:USB Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, yes, Cypress has a very good USB mass storage driver:
DUSE driver

and there are a couple of others if you look.

NTFS and USB support!

[Futurepower(R)]

Very interesting. What is the origin of MS-DOS 7.10? The web page says it has NTFS and USB support!

Re:NTFS and USB support!

[Knifethrower]

Its an illegal Chinese hack. Works pretty good. Love their Win3.11 on a floppy, makes a great rescue disk.

ReactOS the next wave

[eltoyoboyo]

Say what you want about FreeDOS, and Free software in general. But FreeDOS has won. No one need ever pay for MSDOS, DRDOS, or PCDOS again. Those programs are dead. Surprisingly, a 25 year old operating system (even older if you count predecessors like CP/M, TRSDOS, and VTOS) still has uses.

While not 1000x better, as a previous AC posted, ReactOS is taking up where the FreeDOS project left off. If completed, it will replace more Windows and OS/2 systems than it's nearest free competitor.

Re:ReactOS the next wave

[bhima]

FreeDOS is great and I do use it, often.

But the DR.DOS guys have their niche and seem to be doing quite well!

Having said all of that a Free Win98SE also would be useful , I suppose.

Re:DOS is Swedish for "DUHHHHHH"

[Ch_Omega]

Would that be "Do" or "Dass"? :)

KillDisk

[ryen]

for a moment, i kinda laughed to myself saying "who the hell would use DOS still"...
yet at that very moment i had the lowly task of wiping hard drives clean and was using a utility called KillDisk.

i i popped it in and to my amazement FreeDOS began loading program files ;)

Spinrite

[detritus.]

If there's one program that I have used continuiously over the years to diagnose hard drive problems is Spinrite. I was especially pleased with Steve Gibson's commitment to keeping the program DOS-based. There were alot of diagnostic utilities that ran off DOS that I wish were still updated to support modern hardware. Hopefully others will follow Gibson's lead :)

AS400? Eeeep!

[Rassleholic]

I'm still waiting for : FreeAS400

I had a class on AS400 once. The only thing I can clearly remember about it was when the teacher was giving us the answers to our in-class assignment (as we were doing it) and was yelling at us for not paying attention.

Flash BIOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I use MS DOS 6.22 only for flashing BIOS. Could one use FreeDOS for the same goal?

Re:Flash BIOS

[WoTG]

Probably. I've used it once to flash a MB. It was a bootable CD too. YMMV.

Re:Flash BIOS

[DrXym]

Yes. In fact, a lot of the BIOS flash disks that PC & motherboard suppliers put up on their support pages actually use FreeDOS these days.

Re:Flash BIOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Howdy,

Sure you can, for example NetApp
http://www.netapp.com/ seem to do
that with their excelent high end NAS
servers like FAS-960 OnTap 6.5.1.

Upgraded just few weeks ago and took a
look in the tar ball before issuing install
commands. Sure there is FreeDOS integrated
for the flash upgrades.

CTask22d

[Anonymous Coward]

CTask is a public-domain, C multitasking library for MS-DOS. It includes pre-emptive multitasking, support for serial ports, and a few other goodies. Alas, the last update was in 1993 and I don't know if FreeDOS can run it, but I'll throw it out here anyway.

I used it about 10 years ago to write an embedded robot controller for a small company. It's compatible with either the old Microsoft or Borland DOS compilers. I used Borland 3.1. IIRC, there were a few, small bugs in it though.

Download it here.

Try this:

[tehdaemon]

Just looked at DOSBox and the screenshots for the cvs version look promising if you want to run win 3.11

DOSBox

[mattdm]

I don't know about DOSemu/FreeDOS, but DOSBox says it can. (Well, for 688 Attack Sub -- dunno if the +8 means anything.)

To those who replied before me..

[Anonymous Coward]

THE MSDOS 7.10 SITE IS A JOKE!!!

Jeez!!! Why do you take everything so seriously??

Nice try

[tepples]

Opposite approach to Windows NT ("New Technology")

More like "Nice Try".

Re:Nice try

[Gordonjcp]

Actually WNT is one letter on from VMS, and guess what Windows NT is based on?

Re:Nice try

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually WNT is one letter on from VMS, and guess what Windows NT is based on?

What is "closed-source virus code", Gordonjcp?

Well, I did stay at a GNAA Express Inn last night!

(Don't ask how/where they got their wallpaper and pictures.)

I want to use USB CD-ROM drives and hard drives

[Futurepower(R)]

I would never have guessed this would be modded as funny. I want to use USB CD-ROM drives and hard drives during times when that stupid x#!%$# XP fails. I was trying to load XP on a laptop that has no CD-ROM drive, and found that XP likes to self-destruct under those circumstances.

It runs AVSIM51 for 8051 dev work

[ChocoboKnight]

So it's great, with wineconsole the simulator AVSIM51 did not work at all. Under FreeDOS it worked perfectly. I had to use AVSIM51 as one subject in school required it for some assignements. FreeDOS helped me not having to use a Windows box for doing this work. Happy birthday!

Try a FAT partition on the hard drive...

[WoTG]

An alternative that I used when I first used FreeDOS (actually, possibly the only time that I've used FreeDOS) was to use a FreeDOS bootable ISO and keep the flash update file on a FAT32 partition from which FreeDOS had no problems reading. This makes it easy to use the same boot CD for whatever Flash updates are required in the future.

tried those

[Futurepower(R)]

I tried that, and was unable to make it work. The driver apparently is hardware specific.

Re:tried those

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it these are the same drivers ? http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10215

Mmm.... I'll feed the troll!

[solios]

Tell that to Dell, yo. They ship FreeDOS on some of their boxes.

Yay for free DOS utilities!

[lpangelrob2]

Slightly off topic, but I just had a bunch of free DOS (or FreeDOS, as it turns out) utilities save quite a bit of my time tonight, and reading this story reminded me of that experience.

Since our church uses three programs that don't run on Slackware, I had to replace it with Win 2k Professional, which is decently stable and fits our needs. Well, I had one XP boot disk that booted into Windows ME (shudder), no utilities, and no way to access two CD-ROM drives that I needed to install 2k from.

To the rescue? Nothing less than Free FDISK and a Win98SE floppy with generic IDE drivers.

One MySQL client and a Win 2k installation later, and everything looks on track. Who says you don't need DOS anymore? (ahem... Microsoft...)

Thanks for another rescue, folks at FreeDOS!

Re:No I didn't RTFA

[irokitt]

I believe the non-acronym term would be "free bandwidth and nethwork configuration test." How many badly-configured Apache setups have been discovered in the wake of a good slashdotting?

thank you...

[Anonymous Coward]

very much, and keep up the good work.

Free, as in DOS

[Mulletproof]

"FreeDOS is ideal for anyone who wants to bundle a version of DOS without having to pay a royalty for use of DOS."

Wait.. People actually pay for DOS?? But that's like paying for Windows... o_O'
People actually DO that????

The DOS Legacy

[AVryhof]

DOS is a true RTOS. If you want mission critical and fast, DOS does it. It can boot up in seconds, it's fault tolerant (reboot=fixed) and had full direct hardware access.

I have run a lot of operating systems. QNX claims to be an RTOS, Windows CE Claims to be an RTOS, neither are as responsive as DOS.

There is no stupid hour glass in DOS. Batch files make automation a piece of cake, and you don't need a degree in Computer Science to write one.

There are players for all your wonderful media types available. There are also a number of classic game emulators (Genesyst, Nesticle, etc.) available as well.

So, next time that video poker game sitting on the counter at your local bar goes kaput, just remember, it's still running DOS.... turn it off (unplug it?) and turn it back on, you'll doo the next poor drunk a big favor.

Thank you, have a nice day.

Re:The DOS Legacy

[Just Some Guy]

DOS is a true RTOS.

Really? Where can I get the upper-bound response time datasheet? If you mean "quick and responsive" (which it darn well ought to be) then I'd agree. However, I've never heard any evidence of it being a real RTOS (which has an exact technical definition).

Re:The DOS Legacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, more accurately, it's real-time in that it allows you to rape the timer to your heart's content. i.e., if you have a real-time app, you're set.

Re:The DOS Legacy

[Derleth]

Batch files make automation a piece of cake, and you don't need a degree in Computer Science to write one.

Translation: They are just barely competent at scripting simple tasks, but don't expect them to respond to failures (as DCL can) or implement any form of looping (as dead-simple vanilla sh can).

I agree that DOS is the best solution for some tasks. I even agree that DOS batch is good for some things. But when I see buzzwords, I react.

Re:The DOS Legacy

[AVryhof]

DOS Batch files can do looping just fine, and Errorlevels are made so you can respond to errors. You simply execute your command, tes the error level and go to the appropriate label. There are also do and while loops in DOS Batch files.

Re:The DOS Legacy

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS is not really REALTIME. But on
the other hand, it is single-tasking.
So no other tasks will take away the
CPU from you at bad moments either.

If you try to read a file but your
harddisk is sleeping, DOS will take
seconds to respond (it will wait for
the disk to spin up). But if you do
not call potentially slow DOS functions,
then you can assume that your program
will have almost all CPU time for itself.

DOS games will run much better in plain
DOS than in a window inside a multi-
tasking OS. But - depending on which
drivers you load - you cannot use DOS
for really critical realtime stuff.

Of course this does not stop me from
running realtime software in DOS :-).
I simply avoid all possibly blocking
requests (i.e. I never wait for a key
and never do file I/O) during the time
critical sections. Good enough for MY
idea of realtime, but far from what a
REAL realtime system would look like.

PC World - DOS is dead

[Gax]

PCWorld has an article on tech myths that mentions DOS and its derivatives.

"IDC's best guess is that about 1000 new copies of all DOS flavors--MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and the rest--were installed last year. This year? Effectively zip. "There's still some life in it for real specific purposes," says IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky, "but there's zero growth in usage."

Hey guys, stolen code..

[adeyadey]

Dear FreeDOS community,

It has recently come to my notice that your code includes thousands of lines of code stolen from SCOunix, including my well-known malloc routine, and such classic code as "a=0;" (US pat:1269169,"Assignment of null to a variable").

How could you! From now on, every user of FreeDOS [(C)(TM) SCO (patent pending)] is required to buy an SCO end user license, a snip at $699.

Yours lovingly

Darl McBride

Different, and looks like they will work.

[Futurepower(R)]

Wow! Great! Those are different drivers, and the explanation looks MUCH better than for all other DOS USB drivers I've seen.

But, but, but...

[Stupid Dog]

it's still limited to 640kB, after 10 years!
</irony>

Re:But, but, but...

[kristaps.kaupe]

It is not correct to say that DOS is limited to 640k.

1. You can make more conventional memory than 640 kb (by using A0000-B7FFFF memory range in CGA/EGA/VGA text mode)
2. You can load TSR program into UMB (maps on free memory ranges below 1 MB) and HMA (1024k-1088k range)
3. Most of today's programs knows how to use XMS (provided by FDXMS/HIMEM) and EMS (provided by EMM386) memory
4. 32-bit protected mode programs can manage whole memory if neither XMS nor EMS are present

For more information: FreeDOS Technote #202

Re:No I didn't RTFA

[Jim Hall]

Actually, one of the links (FreeDOS.org) was to a list of mirrors. This was intentional, to prevent swamping the host provider with too much traffic. The last time we were slashdotted, I set up this page so that visitors could hit mirror sites instead of the main one (if the main site became slow). -jh

Perl for dos

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yes Virginia, there is perl for dos. Its not easy to compile, and some modules just aren't worth it. But it can be done. And let me tell you, its worth it. You can bash perl all you like, but compared with the other options in dos, its beautiful.

WABI, from your friends at SCO

[wde]

SURE! And I hear these folks are really interested in supporting the Linux community!

http://www.caldera.com/support/docs/wabi/

This brings back memories

[Cro Magnon]

I used to like DOS. Sure, it was limited, but it was still a good OS for my olde 8088. You could get just about any software imaginable for it, and it was extremely low overhead.

you mean anyone would pay for it?

[CyberdogOSX]

of course it's free. who in the hell would pay for DOS?

i cannot think of a more useless pursuit than a DOS clone. hey, let's do a VAX clone. or how about PDP11?

the only reason i would use it is if i needed to run 98. i'd use FreeDOS just to give the finger to MS.