Slashdot Mirror
FreeDOS 1.0 Released
Noksagt writes, "FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be 'a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement' and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support."
How good are the boot disks? I am always running into situations where I need a "DOS" boot disk. Can we put this on a USB key or CD (in addition to the traditional floppy) and get our computers going?
~writes new MS-DOS compatible apps~
I downloaded the full version, instead of the base, but it requires constant attention and keypresses to get through the installer. It does ship with a number of really useful utilities, though, and it does run Worms beautifully, even under Vista* :)
*Note: Virtual PC breaks Aero :(
Free DOS, something like mess-dos? Just say No!
your eyes the one that sees the word, you butts the one that dont
Not when motherboard manufacturers still ship BIOS updaters which require MS-DOS. Considering that you can't even BUY MS-DOS any more, and the images are likely leaving MSDN and Server disks soon, a legal alternative to DOS is still a necessity.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I'm all for MS-Anything replacements ... but I don't understand what this means.
Can someone take a shell box, use this as a root OS, drop an equally front end on top of it, and come up with a Non-Linux OS variant?
If you have a linux box already, do you run this like a Free-Dos-in-the-box, to fudge portability for MS software?
It's brilliant. I'm not. Someone help me out.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It's great and all, but it doesn't seem as useful now as it would have been 10 years ago. Yes, I'm sure it's great for some really old machines, but there just aren't as many of them around now.
'cause it's not cool unless it's tomorrow's technology today or 25 year old technology today.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
XP has the ability to create MS-DOS startup disks which can be used to flash the BIOS. I assume Vista will also have this functionality.
Some BIOSes are include builtin flashing utilities that do not require one to boot into DOS.
This is exciting that we have a FOSS and functional equivalent of MS-DOS 6.22 (with some other features like long file names). I can run my old DOS games on my Mac with QEMU. Now, I wonder when somebody will get started on FreeWindows 3.11?
And I Thought debian's release cycle was slow.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
The submitter didn't even bother putting a link to freedos.org into the submission!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
But does it run Bash?
=)!
C:\>debug
-e b800:0 1 1 21 7
That's just wonderful, but what if one does not run Windows XP? What if one bought OS X and hacked it to run on their non-Apple PC, or runs BSD or Linux instead? There is no legal MS-DOS in those situations, so an alternative is required. For some manufacturers (Asus, Foxconn) it's a non-issue since the BIOS includes an image loader for updates right in the firmware, but for other manufacturers (Gigabyte, Supermicro) that is not the case.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I liked DOS as much as anybody, but FreeDOS is perhaps 5 years too late for anyone to care.
Most people have now (FINALLY) moved entirely off DOS (even Microsoft!), which had a solid niche until a few years ago.
FreeDOS has really poor compatibility with everything I try. Try to run some MS-DOS program, and it aborts before showing anything, or perhaps acts in very weird ways, sometimes doing real damage.
The main thing I tried it for, quite recently, was partitioning/formatting, as Windows has a few limitations in that regard. After finishing the job, Windows couldn't even read the partion. FreeDOS is a LONG way from 100% compatible.
What's more, DR-DOS has been freely available, for a very long time now. You can even get the source code to it, if needed, although it's under a restrictive license. It really is 99% compatible with MS-DOS, both applications and filesystems.
What is anyone using FreeDOS for, today, other than bragging rights?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
thats not nice... some clueless fool might... ...
oh wait. its a good thing. carry on.
I know it's not the same as WfWG3.11, but what about ReactOS? Still a long way to go, but you can begin to run applications on it. And it's 100% FOSS.
If it's not broke, don't fix it.
Why not use MS-DOS? Expense shouldn't be a reason. Or is it just to have an alternative that is out of MS's reach?
The government can't save you.
I'm not that skilled in necromancy, but as far as I can tell, in any system Animate Dead spells work only before the corpse rots away. And in the case of DOS, indeed, they're a tiny bit too late.
I guess it's rather the time for exorcisms now.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
you fail it!
Just for the record:
This prints a little smile in the upper left corner of the text screen
While this is a cool accomplishment does it serve any real useful purpose? I have had no need for MS-DOS since Windows XP came out since you can create a DOS boot disk easily if you need to and all of my old games that I still like to play every once in a while and old apps run file using the XP compatibility mode. Since I have upgraded to XP I use XP on my machines that I just want to use to play games/web browse/code Windows Apps and Linux on servers and machines I want to code Linux apps on. No MS-DOS needed. If I really wanted to load MS-DOS on a machine and couldn't find my old installer disks then I noticed sealed, brand new copies of version 6.22 can still be bought on eBay like the following: http://cgi.ebay.com/Windows-MS-DOS-6-22-Operating- System-W-Sealed-Floppies_W0QQitemZ260027371141QQih Z016QQcategoryZ11685QQtcZphotoQQssPageNameZWDVWQQr dZ1QQcmdZViewItem
So, while I find the freeDOS project cool in a nerdy sort of way I do not see how the amount of effort that went into it was worth the actual usefullness of the project.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Why are you worried about a legal DOS when you're running OS X on non-Apple hardware? Well hey if that helps you sleep at night.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
...maybe I haven't been looking in the right places or for the right things, but there are two things I need DOS for:
1. A means to boot a machine, load network drivers, protocol stacks and maps drives so I can run Ghost.
2. Other things like updating BIOSes
#1 is at the top of my list, obviously. Boot disks are pretty important. Bootable USB thumb drives and bootable CDROMs are good too. Need'm all. Seems like everywhere I look, things still seem to favor the Win98 DOS... it's annoying because I don't want to use those. For lack of a better term, I'd like to see more "marketting" focus on creating boot disk packages that people can use. Make'm as free as BSD so hardware makers can use them without worry. Philosophy be damned if all it does is make people nervous and hire lawyers, or worse, not use what is available because they simply don't understand it and can't afford a lawyer.
So if it were more available and better packaged, I think we'd get more than better acceptance of it, we'd get something of a clammoring for it.
He did also mention BSD and Linux. Those are perfectly legal to use on any PC.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Yes, but does it run Alleycat?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(game)
That's.......excellent. I think I'll go back to browsing the internet, listening to music, and playing games simulatenously on X11.
Although a fully-functional free MS-DOS clone isn't nearly as useful as it would have been 10 or more years ago, there are still uses for DOS today. For example, Symantec licenses PC-DOS from IBM for Ghost to make boot disks with. The one successful commercial clone of MS-DOS (DR-DOS), has apparently found a niche market as a mature, well-documented OS for embedded systems (not phones, obviously). Imagine putting FreeDOS in ROM on a motherboard as a last-resort boot device, along with some diagnostic tools. To say nothing of giving you the ability to run the best word processor ever written (WordPerfect 5.1) on cast-off hardware. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
No matter what Apple say, you're never going to convince a hacker with a copy of OSX that he is prohibited from booting it on a generic box. Where would Apple be today had it not been for the hacker ethos? Steve Jobs well knows the answer to that.
Heh. I had an Asus board that supposedly had a built-in BIOS flasher - but apparently the revision I had contained a bug that ended up nuking the BIOS completely. Very infuriating - it only does one task and at the lowest level possible - shouldnt they have tested it first?? I had to send the board back and get a replacement thanks to their major blunder. Luckily I only had it a few weeks at that point. Supposedly they fixed the bug in later revisions, but after that experience I will NEVER trust built-in BIOS flashers again.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
I had to use FreeDOS for something a few years ago, but I can't for the life of me remember why. I remember running it in QEMU, I remember being simultaneously impressed with QEMU and FreeDOS, but I can't remember what I was actually doing.
Anywho, I know it must be good software because I'm not easily impressed.
Wow! A blue^H^H^H^H^H^H kill me.
Finally! Now I can run loadlin on a completely free OS!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
What? It took them 10 years to implement a DOS clone? Congrats for the most useless software project of the 21st century. DOS was never state of the art, not when it was on sale, not even when conceived by Tim Paterso, who was only too well aware it was a Qick and Dirty hack (hence the letters Q and D in its intiaial name, QDOS).
I agree it's a bit of a PITA but there's a zillion free downloads that include one version of DOS or another. I've had great luck with the extremely roundabout method:
Now, on one hand this is probably illegal by the terms of the EULA, which probably says you can use this copy of DOS only to run whatever utility. (Seagate, for example, will provide you with DOS on a floppy or CD image, in order to deliver unto you the hard disk utility they licensed. It's a very nice one actually.) On the other hand, who gives a shit? The only thing wrong with this method is that it's beyond many people.
The real solution is that all BIOS manufacturers need to implement loading BIOS flash files from, at the very minimum, floppy, ISO CDROM, or MS-DOS format USB device, partition 1. This would eliminate this whole thing. I guess if it came down to it they could always just let you do that by putting FreeDOS into BIOS :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A stable alternative to MS-DOS? Isn't a little early to make that claim?
The government can't save you.
The Linux Dos emulator Dosemu, uses FreeDos. Dosemu is extremely easy to install and use, and once you do, you have access to all the old Dos music applications that have now been released for free.
These include Sequencer Gold Plus, and, if you don't like the tracker interface, the CMU Midi Toolkit, which allows score info to be entered in a text file.
A lot of these original Dos programs really haven't been beat, and when combined with Linux and a modern soundcard and midi/soundfont instruments -- you can have a pretty robust home music setup.
all my motherboards from the last, oh, four or five years have had windows flash utils. While this most certainly leaves non-windows users out in the cold, it still doesn't tie you to DOS exclusively. Whether or not it is wise to flash from windows is a different discussion. The fact remains, those flash utils exist.
Why would that hacker then be worried about having a legal DOS?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
So many things to get from HOTU, so little time... /nostalgia
no more mounting folders and general dinking around with DOSbox! Only dinking around with the real thing! Ahh the thought that I will soon see beautiful CGA graphics brings a tear to my eye. Alleycat as god intended it... sniff
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I'm proud of these guys. Sure, it took 'em ten years, but they've made an OS from scratch that runs applications made for another OS. It's not an easy task. Just ask the GNU guys, or the Linux guys, or the Wine guys, or the ReactOS guys. Even if you don't see the utility of having a DOS clone, there are those who do, and I'll bet they're happy.
Not when my questionably elected, somewhat appointed, congressional representatives get done with them!
That quick and dirty hack you mention finally devolved VMS into WinNT, what a crock of shit :-o Still, I'm glad FreeDOS is here because I still maintain some old production machinery and the controller software runs on DOS. Dosbox is good as well, I recently used it to run an accoustics exe written in QBasic.
I've never been able to get that running on a modern machine.
O.K., clown, how long from Unix to Linux? Now, go sit down.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Does it come with a DOS extender fully compliant with the DPMI and VCPI specs? I think it's worth waiting a few more years for that.
if FreeDOS was finally released, does this mean I can hope for DNF this Christmas?
b/c u got 2nd!!lollerskating!!!11
Send the board back? When I nuked a BIOS, the manufacturer just sent me a couple of BIOS chips. Replacing the chip is easier than taking the mainboard out of the case. The last time I flashed a BIOS, I did it from within Windows XP, with Asus Update. No problem.
He recently paid $60 for the newest "upgrade" (last year!), but the thing is still written in TP, and still cannot be made to print to anything other than LPT1
//computername/printer name to make a network or USB printer print just like it was LPT1, I have to do it all the time for crappy military dos applications. (btw you do need to share the printer out if its a USB printer)
If your talking about windows you can use the net use lpt1:
hmmm...got sidetracked by the idiocy of my employer and I never made the point I was aiming for.
I emailed the guy who wrote (and still sells) the software that he ought to be distributing it with VirtualPC combined with DOS, if he's not going to re-write it in a non-toy language.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Now that FreeDOS 1.0 is done, they can start building FreeWIN3.11 v0.1 alpha on top of it.
;)
(Do they already have a FreeDOSShell? If not, they can do that first).
In 2016, they might be able to start with FreeWIN95.
2026 FreeWIN98
2036 FreeWIN98SE
2046 FreeWINME
2056 FreeWINXP
2066 FreeWINVISTA
Will Microsoft or FreeDOS be first with the Vista editions?
http://www.inspirelight.net/
This may seems like an odd question but, what is happening with the FAT legal battle?
Who own FAT now? FREEDOS can use it ?
M$ is allowing this OS to exist? I know DOS is very own, and cannot be bought theses days but still Microsoft is leaving this "great" software freely available to the public?
Twice in the last month, I had to boot from a XP CD and get into the recovery console and use, gasp, DOS to fix some disk and boot sector problems. Until something else comes along, such primitive stuff still works at the lowest level.
OS X can be bought off the shelf. Just FYI. It doesn't have to be downloaded or copied for someone else to have a copy on hand.
What one does with it -- install it on an Apple-branded PC vs. a big-box PC vs. a whitebox PC -- is up to the person who purchased it.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
OMFG CD-ROM SUPPORT!!!!!!!111111111111111111111111111111111
FreeDOS, eh? Is DR-DOS still out there?
I actually know how to break that down... B800:0000 is the start of the ASCII video memory. First 0x1 is the smiley, next 0x1 is dark blue on black. 0x21 is !, 0x7 is light gray on black.
The memory is 4000 bytes long (longer if you use a bigger mode than 80x25) with 2 bytes for a screen tile. First byte specifies extended ASCII character (charmap.exe with font Terminal will show you all characters > 0x20), second specifies the color.
All colors that can be used are: 0 = black, 1 = dark blue, 2 = dark green, 3 = dark cyan, 4 = dark red, 5 = dark purple, 6 = brown, 7 = light gray, 8 = dark gray, 9 = light blue, A = light green, B = light cyan, C = light red, D = light purple, E = yellow, F = white. Note that the first nibble is the background color, second is foreground. By default, if you specify a background >= 8, subtract 8 to get the displayed background. The foreground will blink. Not sure what mechanism overrides this to allow "light" backgrounds, but I've seen it done.
Hackers or vandals/criminals? I consider myself a hacker, but I try to do the right thing and I do not steal software. You should really think about what you say unless you would like to be grouped with the mass media and the general public that have no clue what words really mean. You come to slashdot I would think you should know this of many of the other people in this world.
hello
Now that there is Privateer Remake to play in Linux, I am all done with DOS.
Yes that was probably an option too - since this was 4 years ago, I don't remember why I didn't just do that. Probably because I didn't have a chip puller handy (it was an enclosed socket) and I didn't want to break anything trying to McGuyver it. Plus since I had just bought it it was within the store's return period, so I decided it was easier to just replace the whole thing.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
As long as it comes bundled with DNF, I'm happy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That method is not so useful for machines without floppy drives. Perhaps it is possible to trick XP into genning a boot disk on a USB key drive but I don't know the trick.
Nero will burn a bootable CD with a DR-DOS startup, but the configuration lacked enough memory to run an Award BIOS updater correctly.
I ended up booting from an old Win98 CD to get the BIOS flash to run...
... but does it run Linux?
This is a depressing thread to read - there seems to be a clear majority that think just because it's not immediately useful to them, it must be a waste of time and pointless.
Until recently, I was a FreeDOS user. I used it on a P100 laptop to connect to my Commodore 64 (the version of the connector cable I have requires a single-tasking OS). Is that a mainstream use? No, not by a long chalk. Is it a useful use? Well yeah, to me it definitely was. The C64 is turned on once in a blue moon to play the odd game or two, and the P100 (saved from a bin) let me transfer disk images off the net directly onto a 1541 floppy disk.
So that's one oddball use. Next up, two more mainstream uses. BIOS flash utilities? I'm on the Mac now, but I remember the majority of BIOS flashes being either required or recommended to be run from DOS. Then from reading some of the more useful posts to this thread I also learn it's in use within the embedded world. So that's two fairly mainstream activities where this helps.
And the final reason? Well....it's obvious. Just 'cos. That's a good and valid reason in itself, and the lack of appreciation for that thought within this thread is what's disappointing me. Just because someone hasn't spoon-fed you something shiny, it doesn't mean that the entire world disregards it. My congratulations to FreeDOS and the the positive posters, and once again - yaah boo sucks to the negative ones.
Cheers,
Ian
>I wrote a look-alike, work-alike windows app in two weeks (using Borland C++ Builder) that worked with his USB printer
>and could even import the data files from the old shitty program-- but he "couldn't figure out how to work it"
If you had succeeded in the "look alike, work alike" departments, he wouldn't have to know you changed it.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
FreeDOS will run programs that I need to read old files that I haven't gotten around to converting.
FreeDOS also runs AutoCad 10. Laugh if you must but it does the job, I own it and it's way faster to use than any of the Linux CAD programs I have tried.
what grade would you get for rewriting DOS 15 yrs later, and would it be higher or lower than the Hurd guys get for taking 20+yrs to get to 0.2 (but doing it the "right" way, with a microkernel) ?
"5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU" - Andy Tanenbaum, 1992
I'm really overwhelmed by all the negativity here.
One of the very useful applications for this is in recycling old PCs. There are a lot of old computers out there that, you know, still WORK. Linux may not be the best choice for them.
Yeah there's talk about the $100 laptop, but you know, there's hardware out there that people would be happy to give away for free just knowing that someone will get some use out of it. FreeDOS is ideal for that.
Want a GUI? You could take Freedos put OpenGEM on it, and have a very useful GUI workstation, with word processor, drawing programs, mp3 player, etc etc.
It's been usable and stable for 8 years or more. And this is in no way equivalent to MS-DOS 1.0 - it's equivalent to the latest commercial DOSes (and even includes long file name support without needing Windows 9x), with a shitload of extra software included as well. In case you didn't notice, it took much longer than 10 years for the commercial DOS developers to do the same.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
will it run Duke Nuke 'em Forever?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
To say nothing of giving you the ability to run the best word processor ever written (WordPerfect 5.1) on cast-off hardware. :)
Heh. I hear ya.
Have you read my journal today?
Umm, aren't they a little late on this one?
Hmm.. next, i'm sure, comes FreeDows, but that name would just be too corny.
Have you read my journal today?
I work in a casino, all slow machines run dos. I know there are still a lot of "embeded" uses still out there.
I haven't tried freedos in a while, but I tried dosbox and it worked well with commander keen on winxpsp2 =)
(I am not affiliated with any of the software listed above)
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You'd be surprised how many DOS boxes and controllers are still out there running custom .EXE's for data acquisition and control and stuff (hooray for QuickBasic 4.5!)... I've got three of them under my responsibility - they've been in-place for yearsandyears and are still doing their jobs without so much as a hiccup.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
It seems that the percentage of non-windows using slashdotters keeps falling. For example, the GP's notion that freeDOS isn't necessary because of WinXP utilities and from the recent tab closing posting regarding Firefox (FF works differently in windows than on many linux systems with respect to middle-click). Now I haven't been here forever, but it seems more common recently to see windows-centric "advice". I'm sure there are more examples of this, but what's the deal?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Does it support Intel Macs? I can't find them mentioned on the project pages.
So, can we boot netware with it?
Network admin here. I take care of about 150 computers in a small school district. I've been using Ghost 8 for the last two years, and it's worked great. For a boot disk, I've been using Bart's Boot Disk also for the last two years. I download the image, grab all the additional driver plug-ins that I need for the different network cards that are around (though I got a crapload of Intel Pro/100 PCI NICs lying around for whenever I run into an oddball NIC now and again). After I created the disk, got the right drivers on it, and set up the menus during the booting of the disk exactly the way I wanted it to be, I burned a copy of the disk to CD-ROM, made it bootable, and from bootup, I now have a bootable CD that takes 10 seconds (not including time to type in password, though I could automate that also if I wanted to...I don't myself) to log into the Windows domain, map a drive on the server that has all the Ghost images, and automatically loads Ghost for me. It uses the Win98 DOS kernel, but whoop-dee-doo. Nothing else comes close (not even Symantec's own bootdisk builder) to creating an efficient method of auto-detecting and loading drivers for your NIC, loading the TCP/IP protocol and using DHCP to grab you an IP, authenticating inside a Windows domain, mapping drives, and above all, doing it in DOS in under 10 seconds (on a CD...took about 45 seconds from the floppy).
As for updating all the stupid BIOS programs that still need DOS to run the flash programs...well, I still got some spare floppies lying around for just such an occasion.
Where's the screenshots?
Bobby Cannon www.sharpdeck.net
Nice!!!
Now, let's start a FreeWindows so we can have a fully compatible Windows 3.11
Imagine that!
(Sorry, couldn't help it, just reminiscing on my old DOS days. Please move along)
To say nothing of giving you the ability to run the best word processor ever written (WordPerfect 5.1) on cast-off hardware. :)
Best. Word. Processor. Ever!
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
I'm not sure if this is possible, but, does anyone think it would be possible to port WINE to FreeDOS? What I thought might work would be heavily modifying OpenGEM or taking code from ReactOS to make a windowing system. Any other thoughts on this?
The ReactOS developers would probably agree with you, which is part of why they chose the name "ReactOS" for their Windows clone.
Whoa. That was quite the flashback.
"Now with EMM386!"
Umm, yay?
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The AM-100 is a datalogger used to collect data from photovoltaic panel fed inverters. It is no longer manufactured and the only software available to collect data from the logger runs in DOS. I run FreeDOS on top of DOSemu in Linux to collect this data. When running under Win98, the logger software would not be stable for more than three days at a time. It was no more stable under DOSemu but I used a cron job to kill and restart the software at midnight (no sunlight so it wasn't collecting data anyway...). Other scripts scrape the CSV files the logger software produces to make graphs. I futhermore run the DOSemu session under GNU screen. This allows me to view the logger software remotely w/ssh. FreeDOS in combination with other tools allowed me to usefully extend the capabilities of a no longer manufactured hardware/software product.
I realize this totally misses the point of TFA, but..
Just go to http://www.bootdisk.com/ and download one of many different illicit/fuzzy/licit DOS bootable images, among others. These guys have been around for some time.. ^_^
--Weasel
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
Did you try the "new printer" - Connected to this computer locally, no plug and play - make a new port - TCP/IP - DNS name or IP of printer - then install the printer?
I've found windows printers tend to pretty much always work better if they assume they're directly connected, and the fact that you can lie and tell windows a tcp/ip connection constitutes the same thing as an rs232 plug to be very convienient. When you install a network printer it tends to bitch a lot and want to check and make sure the printer's there and whatever.
In fact, half of the printers I've installed, if they're network printers and also Laser printers, are in a situation so that windows thinks they're 1.) locally connected, and 2.) HP laserjet series II
~Wx
sig?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
FreeDOS has a feature Linux lacks, DRIVE LETTERS!!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A sucker is born every minute.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
DOS is still used a lot. E.g.: the operating system in my Canon PowerShot camera is a DOS-clone (yes: the processor is 8086-compatible).
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
glad your boss doesn't read slashdot, he sounds too tecno challenged for that. If he did, he might not like what you wrote.
This ad space for rent.
For a while after college I worked a job that required bouncing between locations. The computers in these locations included a 486 Win95, a P2 Debian, a P3 WinME, a P4 XP, and a 386 Win3.1.
A DOS boot disk turned out to be the perfect solution. "Screw your OS, I'm going back to DOS." The old but surprisingly robust word processor worked like a charm, and I got a lot of writing done, despite disparate environments and a wide hardware gap.
Thanks, DOS!
The ______ Agenda
I occasionally use DOS in embedded applications. DOS can actually be faster than Windows. DOS provides near direct hardware access. In Windows, you have so much stuff happening, that it is almost impossible to do anything with low latencies. Effectively, you have two choices: build some custom micro-controller board that can be programmed in assembly (or C), or run DOS on a PC and program in assembly (or C).
For one off systems, custom developing your own hardware costs way more than just using an obsolete PC. Besides, if the idea works out, you can port the code to a custom developed micro-controller board later.
There are lots of people like that, some stuck with legacy software that can't realistically be brought into the 21st century, some just dumbfucks like my boss.
:P
You're fired!!
If the other guy still sells his outdated piece of junk, that means there is a market for it -- you could try selling your app too!
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm been wanting to get rid of them somehow. I need to start getting rid of books I never use.
This ad space for rent.
Intel OS X cannot be bought off the shelf. Just FYI. It has to be downloaded or copied from someone else who has a copy.
10.5 will be available as universal binary, but you will still need to download the "modified for all PCs" version, unless you can figure out how to do it.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
The GP referred to someone who hacked OS X to run on any PC (and in the process violated license agreements, and likely pirated the OS) as a "hacker". I was simply using the same reference, and suggesting that someone who wasn't worried about those legalities wouldn't be worried about downloading a copyrighted DOS, which couldn't be obtained legally.
Yes, I know that "hacker" can refer to a benign person who makes toasters talk and vacuum cleaners cook food. It can just as easily as a person who hacks into other toasters and burn people's bread.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I wonder if you've used modern music software. I've been playing with music software since the DOS days and while sure, there are neat programs for DOS, they don't compare to what's available for Windows/Mac today. Have you played with Sonar or the like? It's really just damn slick. I do have fond memories of things like Scream Tracker, and indeed you can get more powerful modern versions in the form of things like ModPlug Tracker. However once you've dealt with a modern sequence with a robust sampler playing samples gigabytes in size, with any kind of effects you can get a plugin for, it's real hard to go back to a text, spreadsheet like interface with tiny samples.
Now, I'll grant you, you can get the DOS programs for free, professional apps are expensive. However I think it's misleading to say the DOS programs "haven't been beat." I think they have, badly. That's no knock on them, there's only so much you can do when 4MB is a large program and you've maybe half that much RAM. However that's not a problem anymore, and it's nice to see what you can do with a modern system. Sure it's cool to see a MOD player with a robust cubic resampling engine to pitch shift a single note several octaves without distortion. However it's even cooler to have a 5GB sample bank that doesn't NEED pitch shifting, because all the notes have been recorded individually.
I think you'll find that using the "real thing" is impossible unless you want to use it on old hardware. Running DOS bare metal on modern systems is an exercise in futility. The two major problems are sound and speed. Sound is a problem since most modern soundcards don't support the old APIs that DOS programs use. The SBLive had some DOS support, though it had to be loaded via Windows IIRC. The last one with real DOS support was the AWE64 Gold. An X-Fi simply isn't going to do anything at all. Speed is another issue. Though many of the speed gains in processors are in new things like vector math units, the whole thing has just gotten faster. Many DOS programs just can't cope with the speed since it is so far beyond what was conceivable in the day. Their counters overrun before anything can happen, and so on.
And you'll probably find it really annoying and limiting not to have a multi-tasking OS. You just get real used to being able to do lots of things at once and switch around. It becomes very strange to go to a system where you can't switch out to anything. You are stuck at a single command prompt, period.
DOS is single task and not network aware, so if you run a BBS it's one node, dialup only. If you want to run a BSS, and people still do believe it or not, the way to go is something like Synchronet (http://www.synchro.net/). That will run on modern OSes like Windows and Linux as a native app. Because of that, you can run a multi-node BBS with ease on a single system. Also, it's fully aware of their network stacks and will work over telnet as readily as a modem. It even supports teh old Door protocols and yes, Door games work just fine on it.
Basically, DOS is mostly useful for embedded stuff these days where you want essentially a zero impact OS, just something to do your disk and memory management (which is really all DOS did). Anything else, a modern OS does better.
ReactOS started as FreeWin95 but shifted in 1997 to produce a clone of the NT kernel.
The ReactOS team is already skipping forward to FreeWin2k.
"If the other guy still sells his outdated piece of junk, that means there is a market for it -- you could try selling your app too!
"
Watch the "idiot" boss become very smart when it comes to intellectual property and work done for hire by an employee...
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Now I can finally dump that trashy Linux and KDE, and enjoy a full computing experience with my dual core-powered machine!
Well, on my linux installation, I have all my partitions mounted in folders called 'C:', 'D:', 'E:' ...
A free DOS replacement!!! Just in time! come on... be serious!
WP5.1, YES!! still my word processor of choice for getting Real Work done, and it'll run on any piece of crap. I first used it on a 2-floppy XT (no hard disk) with DOS 3.2, mono screen, and 512k of RAM. More than sufficient!
Otherwise, I use DOS every time I test a machine, and every time I work on a hard disk, whether for partitioning, ghosting, or whatever. It's just so bloody much easier and more efficient than anything else. Doesn't even need a working CDROM drive or the ability to boot from CDROM -- things you can't count on when you're resurrecting older or donated hardware.
The guts of DOS, in ROM as an optional boot (Press F1 for CMOS Setup, Press F2 for ROM-DOS Boot) would indeed be a wonderful tool, with very little that can go wrong or be vulnerable to malware or stupidity (from the user or from other programs). Great place to start from if something is misbehaving in mysterious ways.
As to phones, I know someone who built voicemail systems using old PCs and DOS-based software. They were popular enough with businesses that he made a living at it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Nice.
:)
:)
Actually, in about 1997, i disagreed with someone over the use of DOS in a decade. He said it was dead, and after that period, would be totally gone. I still believe otherwise, and hope to ask this question on Ask Slashdot in January.
I still think it is kind of late. I didn't say useless, or even not appreciated, just late.
Have you read my journal today?
Exactly. DR-DOS, PTS-DOS, OpenDOS, etc. These operating systems do not exist, are not free for you to use, and source code for the latter is certainly not available...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Why? Why? Microsoft must be shaking in their boots. What's next: OpenPunchCard 1.0?!
Yeah, since SCO has such a strong case..
I guess not but I'll ask anyway...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Not sure why the parent comment was moderated insightful. FreeDOS has a very bright future and will continue to be used in its niche areas. So indeed it is a very useful project. So I am very grateful for the hard work of the freeDOS developers over all these years. Just the other day I used FreeDOS under dosemu to resurrect some old PowerBASIC code.
FreeDOS+qemu. Then the only thing that costs money is the app, if you care.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, on my linux installation, I have all my partitions mounted in folders called 'C:', 'D:', 'E:' ...
If we assume you made them in /, you still have to do /C: instead of just C:, right?
Or maybe can you fix that with an alias?
You just got troll'd!
... by far the most common use for DOS these days is in the EPOS market, still. If it doesn't have a garish "obviously-done-in-Visual-Basic-on-XP-Embedded" look about it, it runs DOS.
First of all, your step 2 is unnecessary if the CD is layed out at all sanely. At least with mkisofs, you have to use a file as the boot floppy image anyway, and this file is visible within the ISO filesystem. Thus, all you have to do is open up the CD and look around.
But also, my typical solution here was, download a FreeDOS boot CD, and put whatever tools I need either on a floppy or on a temporary FAT partition.
As for the real solution, I'd argue we just need standard, documented ways to flash the BIOS from inside an OS. But there are more intelligent ways. From what I'm told, OS X includes BIOS updates in Software Update, and flashes the BIOS when you reboot -- I've never seen it, but maybe I missed it. That'd be the second best way -- force a reboot, but at least this way you don't have to repartition. Third way would be loading from a partition on the hard disk -- just shrink your FS by a bit, make a tiny FAT partition, then type in the pathname, or have it check in standard places. Your solution is a distant fourth, and in fact, I believe my last computer did this, from a floppy. Some of the newer laptops do it from a USB keychain.
I would still much rather have the system be open enough that we didn't have to beg for things like these. Just use LinuxBIOS and have a standard way of flashing it -- then you can flash it from anything Linux can read, including network, NTFS partitions, the works.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I have read countless comments asking basically the same question, "WHY?". I have the answer. M.A.M.E. I can now build and sell an arcade console complete with FreeDOS and M.A.M.E. installed and any home brew games available. Slap one of the nicer front-ends on it and market it without fear of legal entanglements. What you do with the box once you have it is none of my business. I know you can get boxes like that now but I think a FreeDOS / M.A.M.E. / Some form of Front-end preinstalled would be a nice package for the non-enthusiast.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Do you not realize that DR-DOS, PTS-DOS, and OpenDOS are all under proprietary licenses? They may be legal and freely available, but there's still very good reason for FreeDOS.
USB Key :
While most old BIOS aren't able to boot from a storage class usb device unlike modern one, there are drivers like DUSE and others, that enable the access to USB devices on those oldies.
So one could make a generic "boots DOS with USB support" bootdisk / bootiso and use it everytime you have to flash some BIOS / Firmware and want to save the new ROM on a USB stick. (The combination "USB BootISO + ROM on a stick" come VERY handy when flashing floppy-less boxes).
Front-ends :
A open variant of GEM (huh... Seals ?) is included in the "larger" distribution of FreeDOS.
Also, for those who need a small box just to surf the web, no need for a full graphical environnement, there stuff like Arachne (full graphical browser, GPL. Description at Wikipedia).
Great for a surfbox, and the old 386 on which you'll run it doesn't draw as much power as a Pentium 4.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Programs that depend on the mouse are for idiots. Power users remove their hands from the keyboards as little as possible and worthwhile applications require the use of the mouse as little as possible. A well designed application can be operated MUCH faster with the keyboard than with the mouse.
Seriously man, there is no such thing as a power mouser. You can pretty up the interface and make it mouse accessible but you still need the keyboard interface to match. The same keystrokes should produce the same result.
Microsoft makes Word 5.5 for DOS available as free-beer software.
/
They had to fix a year 2000 bug and decided to give the software away rather than trying to sell it.
Word for DOS 5.0 was a really nice piece of work, although in my opinion the interface had started to go downhill by 5.5 (trying to copy the Windows interface too much).
Details here: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/11/25/free-file
Paid Q&A/Research
I would have thought Uno would be more appropriate.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Hmm. Sounds like the boss found this thread ;-)
This is a tight loop which will fill the screen with garbage and constantly click the speaker. Ah, good times... It's probably been 21 years since I last used it. Hmm, I just tried it in an emulator and it's printing the same character over and over. I may be reading the wrong zero page location, or maybe the emulator isn't 100%, it is an old beta version.
Quite a few NEC NEAX phone PBX systems still run DOS. I'm quite sure NEC no longer makes any new systems that do, but the old DOS-based ones were incredibly reliable. They're still widely used by the military, as well as in many hotels and offices.
I used to work for a place that used one, and except for actual hardware failures or someone screwing up while trying to reprogram it, I don't think it ever crashed in 6 or 7 years of constant use.
(The place I work for now has a PBX that relies on a Windows NT box for its voice mail and voice prompting. In 6 months, I've had to reboot it twice to fix issues with voice messages no longer showing up in people's mailboxes, etc.)
I'm also told that the firmware in the Canon EOS Digital Rebel cameras is MS-DOS based.
...try this, to be sure:
/U
A:\> FORMAT C:
Caution, don't do this on a real PC unless you really feel like head-butting a wall real soon now. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
10.5 will be available as universal binary, but you will still need to download the "modified for all PCs" version, unless you can figure out how to do it.
Or, more likely, you will still need to download the tool that modifies it.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Hey, ChaCha, that name might be used come crunch-time. (not all of us missed your little pun)
DOS is DOS is DOS remains DOS. It remains true that even when it came out it was far from state of the art, and that's why I consider cloning it a decade later a waste of time. Of course people are free to do what they want with their time (reimplement ED.EXE in FORTRAN IV, anyone?). But I fear that FREEDOS' existence will just give IT people more pain, because they will continue to have to support the old legacy systems using DOS instead of being forced to re-design their IT in a clean way so as to take into account what has happened in technology since.
Well, LinuxBIOS sounds fine to me, but I doubt it's going to be the dominant force any time soon. My solution has the added advantage that it works when the system is otherwise hosed. In fact, if you put the BIOS update tools in their own region of the EEPROM or into a separate EEPROM then you can have a machine that can come back literally from anything but hardware failure, especially if you have multiple methods to update BIOS.
There are apple firmware updates; I didn't think the BIOS updates came automatically though, just the assorted driver microcode updates. Not even all of them come automatically, you have to choose to download the apple bluetooth firmware updater for example.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
could anybody seed up a torrent? the download speeds are tragic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not flamebait at all, it's actually the truth...
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Lets wait for M$ to release a new version of WFW that hangs on FreeDOS Jorge
In the past few years Dell has made an effort to make sure that you don't need to drop to DOS to flash the firmware in a piece of hardware. If your PC is ACPI compliant there's some device presented to the OS that can be used so that Windows/Linux/FreeBSD can flash the BIOS.t e.html
http://linux.dell.com/libsmbios/main/dellBiosUpda
The newer LSI and 3Ware cards have a feature like this too.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I wonder if FreeDOS 1.0 has a hard 16 MB RAM upper limit! If so, nobody will be able to accuse FreeDOS of being a memory hog!
We've been invaded, similar to when AOL dumped all the newbies on Usenet. I too remember a time when a sig advertising "free mac mini!" was unthinkable, and Windows users with questions about Windows bugs were rightfully told to go ask Microsoft. Thankfully, there are options to turn off certain sections; I personally have Apple and BSD turned off (I'm perfectly happy with Linux and don't need to see any self-congratulatory wankery or bug reports for other OSes; see my sig). I only wish there was a way to turn off Microsoft and Windows stories as well. For now, whenever I see a Microsoft or Windows headline, I think "who gives a shit?" and ignore it. I'm ever so hopeful that my lack of moderation on those stories (as I get mod points fairly often) will help to turn them to shit so the Windows users will leave. Either that, or I hope they add a feature to slashdot to be able to turn off Microsoft and Windows stories. *sigh* I miss the early Linux only slashdot.
Nathan's blog
finally repurposed those brain cells that I was using to store the arcane knowledge of autoexec.bat and config.sys!
Y'know, if you read "DDOS" as "Double-D OS", you almost start looking forward to getting one...
Do you not realize that the BIOS flashing program you are trying to use is under a propritary license?
What possible benefit could you get from using a (buggy, unstable, etc) GPL'd DOS clone to flash your BIOS?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I was rather fond of DJGPP's environment with RHIDE as an IDE. You could do real-modish realtime peeks and pokes with it while simultaneously allocating large arrays and doing fancy stuff with DMA.
... but my only experience was with sound cards. But don't similar principles apply?
I would think it'd be easier to interface an industrial controller DAC/ADC board that way
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
That's the Windows XP recovery console.
Which is Windows XP running a minimal set of drivers (just enough to load the OS), and then giving you a CMD.EXE
It has absolutely nothing to do with DOS. The only real-mode component of Windows XP is the beginning portion of NTLDR before it switches to protected mode.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
FreeDOS Chili Pie.
Gigabyte has allowed updates from the BIOS itself for at least 5 years... See the screenshot for details
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...
And probably still a good use for it, I would imagine.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Uhh crash windoze.. I just did it by accident.. see if you can repro...
Open cmd.. copy some 50 lines of code (specifically c#) =)! Run the old skool edit editor and try to paste the code via alt-space-e-p and hit alt-enter to full screen the console... here lemme try it.. arrrrghh... 424...
NE1 catch the bug? c: didn't exist til the XT. (Subst didn't exist)