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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.)
I have used FreeDOS previously and indeed it has quite a bit of importance and valuable to use, both as an OS for older hardware, and as well, for running old DOS software games on newer hardware. I have run FreeDOS on Bochs for nostgalgia's sake, to run various old DOS titles. A fully MS-DOS compatable OS does indeed have many applications, such as running older software, nostgalgia, preservation of old computer operating systems, and for older hardware and modern hardware for which a small, lightweight OS is needed.
Once we've gotten up to FreeDos 6.2, will the next release be Free95 (release date 2095), which replicates Windows 95 in a feature and bug-complete way?
They actually have released several versions over the past few years. Although, recently, they have been a bit slow to realese new versions, over the past year or so. FreeDOS is functional and can be used to do things including run many older DOS titles. I think they have been saving the 1.0 version for a point where they have obtained a very high level of compatability with MS-DOS.
I have used FreeDOS to run several programs, and it is useable for many tasks, although it still does have some way to go before it is a perfect imitation. Nevertheless, I am glad to see it is still progressing, since I do think there is a use for this kind of thing.
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.
You're the kind of nay sayer that says that since Duke Nuke'em: Forever has been in production for the last decade it probably isn't worth caring about.
... Apparently there might be some psychological drawbacks to waiting on such things.
I, for one, wait with baited breath for FreeDOS 1.0, and Duke Nuke'em: Forever... which will be out "when it's done." (Read: Any day now.)
Anybody who says waiting for vaporware is like watching grass grow is just crying over spilled milk the cow jumped over the moon the queen of heart of the problem child.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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.
Because.
(Oh, and also because FreeDOS running in a VM plays some wierd DOS games very well.)
Beep beep.
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...
Netcraft confirms it: FreeDOS is dying!
Check out DOSBox
It's an excellent DOS emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, BeOs, FreeBSD, OS/2 and toasters... Wait, it might not run on toasters. You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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!)
Hey, cool, man! I love Fritos too!
Oh, FreeDOS. Sorry, my mistake.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
DoubleSpace?
Even if he's still going to make another few releases, FreeDOS is still dead.
MANY, MANY years into the project now, and yet compatibility with MS-DOS is in a rather sad state, the partitioning/formating programs create corrupt partitions that MS-DOS/Windows will choke on after a little bit or writing to. Many of the programs (Defrag?) still can't even handle FAT32, even though FAT32 has been around forever, and is largely obsolete now. What are the chances of FreeDOS 2.0 adding NTFS support?!
DR-DOS is still freely available, and a much better choice for boot floppies/CDs, as well as running old DOS programs (something like xmess will probably include 100% DOS compatibility before FreeDOS does).
DOS is too old and simple to be of any use in embedded apps as well. Projects like ELKS and ucLinux are far better options. It might be usable by companies' boot disks, but the limited compatibility might make licensing one of the many commercial DOS implimentations a cheaper and more reliable option.
The project is a zombie. It can continue walking on, but it's still long since dead, whether it knows it or not.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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. :)
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.
And the beauty of a lightweight OS that uses the 32-bit flat memory model and has the 'hooks' for multitasking integrated should be apparent to some of us.
I mean, the multitasking sounds optional. A flat memory model would be really, really great for high performance tasks where you just want the core machine.
If you have an 8-bit NIC, sure... If not, the TCP/IP stack won't do you any good, and you just need the old SLIP/PPP programs for DOS.
SSHv1, Telnet, FTP, etc. There's even BOBCAT for a lynx-like browser, except that it's somewhat painful on an XT, and crashes after every ~20 pages you visit (out of memory).
It was only a couple years ago I still had an old 286 up and working this way. Not for any good reasons, mind you, just for the hell of it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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!
Yes, a lot of people care.
DOS still has a large user base out there, espcially in the embedded and machine controller markets. So yes, people care.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway. -John Wayne
Interesting quote from a draft dodger.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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
C:>_
What else?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
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.
From the new UDOS site on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/udos):
:)
uDOS is a free operating system built on the FreeDOS kernel with DJGPP. uDOS provides an integrated suite of features inluding Perl, Python, etc., as well as a Watt-32 based networking environment and ELF library support. Can be run live from CD image.
Discussion for UDOS currently takes place on irc://irc.freenode.net#djgpp
UDOS does a great deal to demonstrate what DOS tools are still out there, as well as the bugs they have! Many problems reported with the CD bootup involving LFN support, EMM386, etc. Not sure *nostalgia* is the right word for this kind of thing, but hey whatever...
Ah, and the ELF support isn't in just *yet*, pending release of DJGPP 2.04 so that the ELF patches can be made part of the core compiler as 2.05 (the last thing people need are *two* DJGPP distros). Now DJGPP just needs a release manager. Any takers?
FreeDOS is the only way to flash a BIOS using Free Software. Never mind the slow release cycles, it already works and it has helped me upgrade countless computers, without a single copy of MS-DOS on hand.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
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
iirc early versions of windows could only multitask windows apps.
windows 3.x in 386 enhanced mode could multitask dos apps but at least for games it didn't work anywhere near as well as native dos. 9x was much better at it but your already getting pretty bloated by that point (and i certainly don't call 9x an early version of windows).
also iirc tcp/ip using the windows stack from a dos app was afaict a pita (ID software reffered to it as a delicate balancing act and iirc there was a seperate windows helper app).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
DOS is one of several operating systems that I have installed and can boot-up into on my AMD Athlon 64 3800+ computer. I actually have PC-DOS 2000 (instead of FreeDOS) installed on the first partition of my first harddrive, it is a FAT-16 partition. When booting up, a menu appears that allows me to choose whether to boot up into Windows 2000, PC-DOS 2000. or one of several different versions of Linux. PC-DOS 2000 was a minor Y2K upgrade of the Last version of DOS that IBM had released. As you may recall, Microsoft and IBM each had their own versions of DOS since back in the 1980's Surprisingly, my AMD Athlon 64 can run more than just 64-bit software. I don't recall if DOS is 16-bit software or what, but it runs just fine on my AMD Athon 64.
The obvious question is why would anyone want to run DOS on a modern computer? Well, I have fond memories of tinkering with batch files, DOS commands and old DOS games back in the late 1980's and early 1990s. Every once in a while, I like to re-experience the retro experience of what it was like to run DOS. I do not boot-up into DOS very often, but I am glad that I can choose to boot up into DOS once in a while when I want to. Of course Linux, Windows or almost any other modern OS is actually better on a modern desktop computer for everyday use.
I actually have a mixture of Free-DOS and PC-DOS 2000 installed on the fat-16 partition. If I remember correctly, I did that by installing FreeDOS first and then later installing PC-DOS 2000 on top of it. Afterwards, I then manually edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to remove any wierdness that resulted from istalling both that way. I had a slight preference for the PC-DOS 2000 but doing it that way gave me all the extra free software and some Linux/Unix like commands that come with the FreeDOS. Am I the only one out there who occasionally boots his AMD Athlon 64 3800+ up into DOS?
There are actually several choices for running old DOS programs. One choice is Free-DOS. Another choice is DR-DOS/OpenDOS which, if I understand correctly, is a commercial product in which the source code of the kernel has been under an Open Source license. Another alternative is to run the free DOSBox emulator under Windows or Linux. Using DOSBox I have been able to run old DOS games such as "Commader Keen" under Linux and even managed to get my USB joystick and modern soundcard to work with it. Yet another option is to use VMWare to create a virtual machine for FreeDOS and run it in a virtual machine under either Linux or Windows. Even though their are other alternatives, I am glad to see that the FreeDOS project is still alive and about to release version 1.0.