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FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wide-wide-world-of-os-hacking dept.

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.)

2 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. I use freedos on a daily basis by Wierdy1024 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!)

  2. Freedos writes OS2 Warp floppy disks by Penicillus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!