Slashdot Mirror
FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent
Lisa writes "Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, says that while work on the project may have slowed recently, he isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month." (So rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.)
Yes. Embedded systems vendors, firmware upgrade disk image producers, people who like the simplicity of DOS, PC manufacturers who want to get around Microsoft's refusal to OEM-licence windows to them if they sell PCs without any Operating System (Microsoft has a big, nasty industry campaign against "naked PCs"...). There'll be a niche "market" for FreeDOS pretty indefinitely, it's pretty much the "last DOS standing", since Microsoft gave up on MS-DOS. No, not _many_ people will care. But with Open Source, a few are enough.
Everyone that builds network imaging boot CD's does.
Freedos rocks. Tcp/ip stack and all the goodies to make imaging machines from a network image repository with ghost of other dos based imaging apps a real treat/breeze.
universities love freedos, researchers do as freedos works on old Pc104 386 based boards for space based or rugged terrain data collection on hardware that the only collection app is an old dos one that will not run under linux. most machine shops love freedos as it's the only way to keep those old machines that use dos running instead of buying new CNC hardware and software for tens of thousands of dollars when the old machine works just fine.
I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A 32-bit multitasking DOS could still be "light-weight". Remember DESQView? I can't imagine(*) it would be all too difficult to add some sort of a supervisor to manage multiple DOS sessions. Any DOS box (box as in hardware) running an Expanded Memory Manager (such as EMM386) is already on its way there as the EMM continues to run DOS in V86 mode.
(*) In my imagination, there's a mysterious genius out there who understands every nuance of DOS and I86 hardware who's more than willing to put time into this. :)
Apparently floppies aren't dead as this person uses them often.
There are lots of older PCs that don't have a working CD and tons more that don't have usb ports, or don't have a bios capable of booting from USB.
Kind of like early versions of Windows?
Everything you need to boot an XT PC onward to today's PCs, format and/or do system installs?
Open-source too?
A very useful project!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
A few problems.
1. It doesn't work.
2. Have you ever, you know.. used Linux? It could be my memory playing tricks, but I can't for the life of me recall the "Run in Compatibility Mode" to run my DOS games in Linux.
You completely missed the point. It's not about what DOS has done in the past, it's about what it needs to do to become a useful and viable OS in the near future.
FreeDOS isn't some retro-programming experiment, trying to make old games work on old hardware. It's niche has been for Windows boot disks, and for use in dual-booting. But with 2000 and XP defaulting to NTFS, you'll see FreeDOS no longer working properly for either job, just as older OSes with only FAT16 support have gone away as well.
In the next few years, as Microsoft gets a clue, and it becomes easier for average people to create WinPE/BartsPE boot discs, DOS will become a distant memory... Just as distant as CP/M is now.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Funny, I just used it tonight to flash my mobo BIOS. Damned older BIOS wasn't reading the new CPU fan's slow RPM correctly so it freaked and wanted to shut down at boot. MSI had a fixed version, but figuring out how to flash it was a hassle.
Any recommendations for a replacement method for BIOS flashing?
Yep, except without windows. Usablity of task switching without bloat, restrictions and requirements of GUI. Comfortable way to run multiple applications without forcing them to be written and designed in some highly specific way.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
>>They haven't released anything in 12 years
>spliffy@sarge:~$ apt-cache search freedos
>...
>dosemu-freedos - FreeDOS package for DOSEMU
>Seems they have.
Or maybe not. You are running sarge. Software that's twelve years old would still be considered a bit on the new side of things. I, for one, am surprised it made it out of testing so quickly.
Check out DOSBox (...) You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
Good old Dosemu works pretty well for me, especially on a Pentium III @ 750 MHz. I've heard DOSBox requires several GHz to acceptably emulate a 486DX2 @ 66 MHz. Dosemu does not emulate the CPU, so it is an order of magnitude faster.
Dosemu used to be hard to configure and used to require root privileges and direct acces to the hardware; recent versions have pretty much gotten rid of those problems. I run most of my games with xdosemu in a regular window, I can easily switch to full screen if I prefer, I get very nice MIDI thanks to ALSA + Sound Blaster Live, etc. Of course the experience depends on the games, some of them had funky ways to address the hardware, there are a few cases where Dosemu doesn't cope that well (jerky mouse in a few games). But I can play Day of the Tentacle, Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore, Arkanoid, Ecstatica, the Elder Scrolls: Arena just fine, and that's just those I tried this past week-end.
What he did had nothing to do with courage. He swore he would sign up. Repeatedly. He even went through the motions once, but did not follow through. Plus, we are talking about World War II, not the current "War on Terrorism". Then, he makes dozens of movies where he is a war hero. Doesn't sound so "anti-war" to me.
For an example of a REAL courageous anti-war indiviual, click here
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
How is the fact that FreeDOS is GPL'd possibly a benefit? You're running a closed program, to update the closed firmware, on your closed hardware.
DR-DOS is both free as in beer, and the source is freely available, though certainly not GPL-compatible (neither is qmail, but that hasn't stopped people from using it).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant