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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.)
At work we found an ancient "portable computer" built by Compaq - we couldn't find any installer disks old enough to work with it so we installed FreeDOS. It wasn't really useful for anything, but it was fun - especially since most of us are young enough that if we have used DOS it was when we were children. Everyone was amazed that we got the old beast working. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who needs DOS for something, if only an hours entertainment...
I use freedos on a floppy, with NTFSdos pro, to do some handy scripting changing registry entries on windows boxes without booting them. No other way I can thing of doing it, other than a liveCD of something, but that negates the point, as everything must fit inside about 4MB for my purposes. Also, occasionally, use a network freedos floppy, but I'm annoyed at the lack of a "universal" ethernet driver - even if performance is slow - rather like the universal 640x480 video driver in windows. Also, support for SATA drives is poor at best - and I can't find a driver for most chipsets. (although having said that even the windows XP install doesn't find most right!)
I still run several DOS applications and even piddle around with my old PowerBASIC compiler in FreeDOS running under DOSEMU. DOSEMU works very well for most things (non-graphical) and runs several orders of magnitude faster than bochs (no emulation of the cpu). FreeDOS and DOSEMU are a great match. Plus all the years of Unix innovations in the command line have been incorporated into the FreeDOS shell, makeing DOS actually quite nice to use in all its 16-bit glory. For graphical DOS stuff, I use dosbox which has it's own DOS implementation but, like bochs, emulates the hardware as well (but is way faster than bochs) and allows sound and vga emulation for running the old Sierra games.
FreeDOS still has a bright future in several niches. There is still a need for a 16-bit, real-mode operating system in a number of embedded situations.
You know, it would be nice if people would actually bother to do a little research before they post...
If you'd bothered to even glimpse at the FreeDOS web page, you'd see that the first priority of FreeDOS is and always has been to maintain a lightweight, completely DOS compatible OS. FreeDOS-32 is a completely different project. Any multitasking extensions (think DR-DOS in its latter days), GUIs (FreeGEM, notably, among others), etc... have always been planned after and as an adjunct to FreeDOS, not to replace it. There's still plenty of life left in DOS and the DOS environment. I for one would love to see a high-performance, single-user OS optimized for modern hardware without the cruft of the NT based MS OSs OR Linux.
A long time ago, I copied my OS2 Warp installation CD to my hard drive; the CD is now someplace safe. In February, I used FreeDos to make OS2 Warp disk images from the hard drive, and installed OS2 onto an old 486. When the OS2 disk creation program is run under MSDOS 6, 7, or Win98 the 1.88 meg installation disks are created occasionally, and with agony; the dos window format of W2K and XP won't touch anything over 1.44 megs. FreeDos writes the 1.88 meg format easily on normal HD floppies, and all the floppies work the first time. Thank You FreeDos Developers!