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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Funny that this should come up as I only noticed yesterday that Dell sells systems with FreeDOS now.
e .a spx/desktops_n?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compar
This is great as I've been buying the cheapest SC servers to avoid the microsoft tax. With prices starting at $319, i can now afford to buy the 20 or so systems i was planning on for the business. nice
Considering that the original API's were based on CP/M, I don't think M$ 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).
Hey, has anyone tried making this a DOS session on Linux? That would be sooo cool!!!
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..
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.
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!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Just curious - how do you "inject" files into an ISO image? Pardon my ignorance.
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.
Well, not an API but a data structure, there apparently is for FAT, but it is under review.
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.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Very interesting. What is the origin of MS-DOS 7.10? The web page says it has NTFS and USB support!
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.
Have you Meta Moderated t
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
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 :)
I use MS DOS 6.22 only for flashing BIOS. Could one use FreeDOS for the same goal?
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.