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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."
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 :(
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
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.
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.
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.'"
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.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I wish I knew how you people find moderators dumb enough to mod this kind of crap up.
DOS is still heavily used in industrial control, with new programs being written for it every day. In fact, literally tens of thousands of computer-driven machining tools are running DOS right now as they run through their paces. DOS is literally the most popular OS in this space.
If people want to keep using those machines, and they're smart, they'll back up the programs right now, and burn them to a CD with a copy of FreeDOS. Someday they won't be able to find hardware their original DOS runs on. Of course, a lot of them just load from floppy, so all THOSE people need is a floppy image; they can burn it to a CD and boot from that someday when they can't find a 386 or a 1.44MB floppy drive for less than a hoijllion dollars.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Couldn't agree more, probably because I've spent about twenty-odd years in industrial control. The embedded world runs a Texas shitload of DOS, and the arrogance of people that assume that if it doesn't run from a hard disk and have a GUI it's obsolete just astounds me. FreeDOS claims that it can be ROMmed ... if so, it's a viable replacement for a lot of expensive industrial DOS clones out there (datalight and others.) People just don't realize the sheer number of embedded systems that support their lifestyles, they really don't.
Forgetting the embedded space for a moment, I downloaded FreeDOS 1.0 yesterday just for the heck of it, and installed it on an old P166 laptop I had lying around. I dumped a bunch of MP3 files onto it, and immediately began playing them with the included MPXPlay package. It took a while to get TCP/IP working on a 3COM 3C575 Cardbus adapter, but once that was done I had a nice DOS system with browsing, email, and a ton of other stuff.
As a matter of fact, FreeDOS is organized much like a typical Linux distro (even uses some of the standard DOS disk tools that come with most Linuxes) and includes a lot of applications if you get the full download. Memory management is very good: right out of the box it got more conventional RAM than I ever got with QEMM in years past. Some of the utilities are still a bit lacking in support for FAT32 and LFN, but overall a very useful package. Jim Hall and other contributors to the project are to be commended for their efforts.
DOS is as obsolete as the internal combustion engine.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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.
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