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 :(
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
'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.
=)!
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 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.
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.
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.
Dude, it was just released. Give it a chance to be used, before you complain that no-one uses it.
Someone put a tonne of effort into it, and you should have some respect for that at the very least.
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!
Well, it's pretty handy when used in combination with dosemu, as it allows distros to ship a fully functioning DOS box on Linux without requiring non-free software.
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.
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.
Its been stable for years. It just didnt have the 1.0 version mark for people to notice it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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.'"
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.
There's also a lot of people who write embedded applications in DOS or DOS-like OSs. Having an open source alternative to aging, poorly supported closed-source OSs is good news to them.
Not when my questionably elected, somewhat appointed, congressional representatives get done with them!
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?
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.
You can use it in emulators and use it for an operating system if you're selling a bare PC.
It's nice for legacy stuff - I had a client once that ran a QBASIC application and we had to set up a couple more machines for him. FreeDOS was nice and legal, since I had no idea how to buy a license for MS-DOS. It's not like you can walk down to the store and buy DOS these days.
I have an unopened copy of DOS 6.22 around here somewhere, but it's buried in a box, most likely. Probably next to my 70 NT4 Workstation licenses.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
POS systems all over are still using it. The office machines used to administer the old software's usually running windows and the POS software in a DOS box though, so even if FreeDOS was used for the sales floor machines, it'd be of limited use to the office where they need MS Office-type applications and other things currently not available for DOS.
Not that it can't be used, but I think the world's pretty much moved to GUI and won't be going back. I just don't see a killer app coming for a new DOS.
vi? Who's that?
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
FreeDOS was a solid program even then.
The moderators are the same as the posters. The only computing activities they know about are:
1) Games
2) Internet
3) Basic word processing
4) Compiling hello.c
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.
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."
Hey, it's beer... I mean, free. Can't be from MS, right?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I loved that game. Along with sopwith. But it's one of those things that I thought was incredibly obscure and nobody else played. I know better these days.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
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.
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.
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
Where I work we have a lot of those scrolling LED display bars. They're all run by DOS boxes. The company that made them has a Windows version of the software, but it's not compatible with the dozens (hundreds?) of light bars we have, and we're not about to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace them.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
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 don't know if this is a false memory or not, due to age. But I do seem to recall a few years ago when I was checking out FreeDOS, I was able to get CD-ROM drivers to load just fine using stuff like oakcdrom.sys, the drivers for the old CR-563 series drives, etc., combined with a copy of mscdex.exe yoinked from a MS-DOS boot disk. So, CD-ROM support in FreeDOS doesn't seem like all that big a deal to me. Now, if there was DVD-RW, and CD-RW support, that would be another story.
This space unintentionally left blank.
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)
5) Gentoo or Ubuntu
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.
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
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?
Because you can't buy MS-DOS even if you wanted to. Besides, FreeDOS offers a lot more capabilities than MS-DOS 7.x ever had. 7.x was the final release of MS-DOS, and it was never sold as a standalone product, only as part of Windows 9x.
And if DOS is important to you (as it is to many, many people and companies) and completely open-source GPL'ed version that is beyond Microsoft's reach is certainly a good thing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
My main product is a DOS application (well I sell Linux and Win32 versions too but customers who care about device support get the DOS one, plus I price it to encourage DOS use since support is much easier) which for some reason doesn't work under FreeDOS (the "open file" calls fail, of all things, but I can't duplicate it in real-mode code). It does work fine under MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, and the usual DOS boxes (it's been so long since I tested ROM-DOS or PTS-DOS that I've forgotten what happened), so it's hard to feel like it's my fault. Really diminishes my respect for FreeDOS though. Also their COMMAND.COM doesn't accept commands like "dir .txt" which worked on every version of real DOS (and are heavily programmed into my fingers), so I wonder if some of the developers weren't even DOS users? DOS is all about the nitpicky details (since it was so crude that we all had to commit some horrible atrocities to make our programs actually get work done) so they can't skimp on stuff like this.
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
Why not? But you'll need a 386 for that, and a copy of CWSDPMI.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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.
evilviper said: "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."
Perhaps?? What, you're not sure how it's acting? Sometimes doing real damage..??? What?! Like how, causing your hard disk to burst into flames? Causing your monitor's side paneling to melt off? Please, be specific about how FreeDOS "perhaps, does real damage" to your computer! It is extremely hard to do any "real" damage to a computer through software means. The worst-case scenario is BIOS-failure-based bricking of your box, and if FreeDOS is capable or likely to do that, I would be very afraid, but this is simply not the case.
It generally takes a very specific and directed effort to cause "real damage" to a PC. It's well known that there have been a couple of viruses in the past which were capable of nuking your CMOS. However, a sledgehammer is just as useful if you're looking for "real damage".
evilviper also said: "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."
Which version of Windows couldn't see the partition? How big was the FreeDOS partition you tried? Does your BIOS support the size of the hard drive you were testing? In order to make such statements, one should be specific with the details. And if you really want to convince people to NOT use FreeDOS, you should maybe explain just how it "is a LONG way from 100% compatible." besides vague failures.. For all we know, the problem could actually exist between the keyboard and the chair, you evil viper you!
You seem to have a lot of Anti-FreeDOS FUD with no real facts to back it up.. You work for Microsoft, perhaps?
My personal reasons to love FreeDOS (recent Win32-ports aside): Terminal Velocity, DOOM, DOOM II, Descent 1 & 2, Death Rally, Epic Pinball.. The list is almost endless! And it's not for the gaming, it's for the nostalgia and memories.
--Weasel
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
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.
No, it just (finally) hit 1.0. That number isn't magic. New uses aren't going to just spring up when you reach that point. They've been making (beta) releases for years and years.
Respect doesn't change my question at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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!
I never said otherwise. The installed base of DOS systems is large, but it certainly is declining, as other more advanced OSes take over. An installed base isn't something you want to aim for, as they've already got everything they need, and aren't going to be pursuing new features, or new code that does the same as the old.
Do you think there's a chance in hell they're going to rip out their commercial DOS, and replace it with FreeDOS? It's not even all that compatible, as stable, etc. If they were going to "mess" with things AT ALL, they wouldn't be making a small upgrade from one DOS to another, they'll be going to a whole new OS.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not to mention in Symbol RF guns. Used heavily in warehouses throughout the nation, they are full functional mobile PCs. The newer ones have Windows CE, but not the one that connect to our servers, they have DOS.
I never knew how rusty my DOS skills were until I tried to walk a warehouse guy across the nation through troubleshooting 802.11 wireless authentication across a VPN tunnel on one...
I am actually.
I tried a handful of DOS games I had lying around, and always ran into one compatibility bug or another. Do the most popular ones even work for you? Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, etc.?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
But you're willing to spend the time and effort to switch over to FreeDOS as the underlying OS, and track down any bugs that might appear?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, on my linux installation, I have all my partitions mounted in folders called 'C:', 'D:', 'E:' ...
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.
FYI, the largest selling CPUs are 4, 8 and 16bit machines. There's also a lot of tiny 32bit hybrids (386 class with small memory footprints). For the kinds of jobs a lot of these systems do, DOS variants are ideal. There is still plenty of DOS based software in use, and it'll stay in use as long as it's more economical to use it.
I've found FreeDOS to be pretty compatible, as long as you (ab)use it right. Perhaps you forget the umteen choices on your Dos 6.22 boot menu that you needed to get all jobs done. FreeDOS is the same, there isnt a one-size-fits-all config. And in extreme cases it can be patched to suit, as it's nowhere near as complex as those "whole new OS" you talk about. Let's face it, program load, ports and 13h calls are pretty easy to write for. Not anywhere near as hard as say writing a device driver for a unix clone is.
like CNC machines, and a like. Hell I think most of the factories in Michigan run on DOS still. lots of terminals still do. (I live in GA, but grew up in MI)
SimonTek
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 ]
Naturally FreeDOS was tested with popular (and unpopular) games. People being what they are, games are the front-line compatibility test for any OS in a replacement situation. Doom was always one of the first applications for stress testing on memory managers, not just under native DOS but running under Qemu and VPC 2004. Dukem Nukem, also. Quake, I don't explicitly remember, but other programs using the Quake engine were successfully tested by developers. Obviously, the larger count of end-users try a far greater range of programs and offer a stream of feedback on those.
It's difficult to address your comments in detail without knowledge of what you tested and when, but they sound as if they are based on versions of FreeDOS from two or more years ago. Probably the biggest breakthrough for running the Doom et al games with the standard FreeDOS EMM386 was when VCPI support was added a couple of years ago -- prior to that you could only run DOS-extended games under HIMEM or,if supported, without any memory manager. That restriction hasn't been necessary for a while now.
For the last year, most changes to FreeDOS have been to improve compatibility with more and more applications and clear up edge conditions, e.g. fix problems with free XMS memory >512M for DPMI hosts. If anything, I think the claims of FreeDOS compatibility for running different DOS applications has generally been understated. (COMMAND shell and Windows/advanced environment extensions compatibility, not so much, although I understand that improvements in those areas remain under vigorous development). At least twice in the past an open invitation has been made on the development and user lists to report ANY programs which failed to execute under FreeDOS, but worked with MS-DOS. Too, FD Bugzilla has been scoured for reports of failing applications which did not fail under MS-DOS, with all reports tracked, tested, and debugged if the application was available. I don't recall seeing your report there, but I might have missed it.
What some may not understand is that FreeDOS has to match completely undocumented MS-DOS behaviors and quirks to run well-known applications. I can give two examples I personally know the details on. First, some DOS-extended Borland applications depended upon an internal version of DOS to be set to a particular value, not because it wanteed that value, but because the Borland DPMI host didn't properly set CX and expected a zero CX value to drop through -- as it did with MS-DOS -- or else it blew the stack. And a compatibility fix for QuickBASIC 4.0 compiled programs was made immediately prior to FD 1.0's release because QB4 depended on MS-DOS allowing a re-release of a freed block of memory without error while spanning multiple unrelated memory management calls. Tracking those sorts of problems can be painful, but it's been done, and those are just two examples of non-FreeDOS-sourced problems successfully resolved. And for that matter, I know of one class of DOS-extended applications which run better under FreeDOS than MS-DOS because the applications made inappropriate assumptions about memory that FreeDOS works around.
All in all, there has been a great deal of effort made to make FreeDOS run all applications that MS-DOS will run. Doubtless a few problematic applications remain, and certainly particular user environments or setups may have issues as well. But I don't think calling out a list of popular games or other DOS programs will trigger a general failure report across most systems.
This idea isn't entirely unheard of. Some Tandy 1000 models had MS-DOS burned into it's ROM for instant start-up times.
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!
... if you talk about terminal velocity then don't forget :D
raptor & whacky wheels
renum
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
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.
>DOS is literally the most popular OS in this space.
The OS/firmware in some (all?) Canon D-SLRs is a DOS variant.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Hey, ChaCha, that name might be used come crunch-time. (not all of us missed your little pun)
For that matter I have a Tandy/Casio/GRiD Zoomer/Z-PDA-7000/GRiDPad 2310 and it's just a NEC V20-based (8086 clone) PC running GEOS. I forget whose DOS they used, though... but its full OS is, unsurprisingly enough, in memory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.'"
It would seem that you're more into retro games than I am. I don't do arcade-style games — hand-eye coordination issues.
I'm suprised to hear that there are compatibility issues. The fact is that DOS (and its clones, such as FreeDOS) are not really OSs, they're just a think library layer between the application software and the hardware. So probably your compatibility issues have more to do with hardware than your OS.
You might have more luck running old games under DOSBox than on a system booted up with FreeDOS. (That's the only way I've every run FreeDOS.) That system does a very good job of emulating the old hardware you probably don't have. There's a huge list of games that are known to work well with DOSBox.
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
Sorry, I forgot about ME since, well, a lot of people including Microsoft wish they could forget ME. But so far as the general user bases of Windows 9x and ME was concerned, DOS didn't exist and that's pretty much how Microsoft wanted it. But from the standpoint of someone like myself that was developing and shipping DOS apps at the time, I wasn't happy about having to use a product as my primary operating system that was being treated as a mere loader program for Microsoft Windows. At that point, I just stuck with DOS 6.22 since at least it was sold as a standalone product and I'd had some years experience with it.
... a lot of them appear to have come from the Linux/Unix world. Many of the apps included in FreeDOS are Linux ports, and as I said before the whole thing has rather a Linux distro feel to it (that's not necessarily bad, but it's definitely different.) They don't claim it's perfect yet either: for example, I noticed that some of the commands (like CHKDSK!) don't handle FAT32 yet, and LFN support is spotty.
You're right in what you say about FreeDOS, but to be fair they do include a copy of the 4DOS shell with the full package, which I immediately switched to when I was playing around with it (their shell didn't feel right, I agree.) I had used 4DOS for years and became very comfortable with it. And you're right about their developers not all being DOS users
Still, unlike MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS and the usual DOS boxes it's a GPLed open-source product so if there's sufficient interest I expect those nitpicks to get fixed.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Just out of curiosity, may I ask the nature of your application? It's good to hear about DOS development now and then.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
finally repurposed those brain cells that I was using to store the arcane knowledge of autoexec.bat and config.sys!
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've got Doom, Doom2, Quake, and alot of other older and somewhat newer games working great under dosbox, Quake needs alot of power, i had to set dosbox up to 80,000 cycles, but it runs just fine, in a window or full screen.. if something doesn't work browse thru the dosbox.conf and play with some settings, most things seem to run pretty well for me....
I've run the same programs, on the same hardware under MS-DOS. This was probably a year ago now, since I tried FreeDOS, but it doesn't change quickly, so I doubt it's been fixed.
I realize DOS programs are rather low-level, but they don't just run on the hardware directly. They make numerous calls to different parts of the OS, directly address RAM where it expects certain drivers to be loaded, etc. Anything less than a 99% exact copy of MS-DOS, and high-end DOS programs have trouble.
It certainly is possible that FreeDOS and MS-DOS only act differently when given hundreds of GBs of RAM to play with, and a multi-GHz CPU
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
Good question. There are several commercially-available DOS clones that have various levels of support attached (not that Microsoft's "support" of MS-DOS was all that valuable anyway) and those are used heavily, particularly for embedded apps. DOS is also a very old, very stable, relatively predictable environment. It's pretty much a commodity item, doesn't change much, and there really isn't much support actually required anymore. That's obviously not the case for a commercial Windows or Linux application, but for DOS stuff you can get away with it.
In any event, if you're in a situation where you are actually using MS-DOS, support is a good reason to go with an open-source option such as FreeDOS, assuming it's compatible enough. If nothing else, you can support it yourself if you have the expertise.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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...
What can I tell you? The same programs you say won't run on FreeDOS are known to run on DOXBox + FreeDOS.
And probably still a good use for it, I would imagine.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
We have a whole fleet of engineers on staff and in the building 24 hours a day for emergencies. They do this sort of thing in the down time between each crisis. No biggie.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Trust me, you don't care about my application! But anyway it's an emulator for DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. DOS is a wonderful place for a project like that because I can help myself to all the hardware I need, so I reprogram the clock chip for 50/60 Hz and take over the keyboard to make it DEC-style so NumLock is a data key and ENTER doesn't autorepeat and the LEDs are under software control, and download DEC characters into the SVGA, and run a blinkenlights board off the LPT port, and program the FDC for 26-sector single density mode, and on and on, all that kind of stuff you can do easily in DOS that takes buttloads of ioctl()s on other systems (so, lots of context switches) if they let you do it at all. And there's no multitasking so the response time is great (except during file I/O of course). Plus I roll in my own drivers for a bunch of weird optional hardware (RocketPorts and I/O bus adapters and parallel interfaces), and those drivers keep on working year after year, not like anything I've written for Linux, where I have to write separate kernel drivers which break even between minor versions of a supposedly "stable" kernel series, so I'm always fixing them up to match the latest gratuitous kernel changes. Anyway last winter's big project was adding support for SMP motherboards, for emulating multi-CPU PDP-11s -- well it doesn't work on my new AMD64 X2 board but I'll sort that out -- I love this though, I can't think of any other OS where you could slip your own SMP code in underneath a totally non-SMP-aware OS. DOS's brainlessness is its greatest strength.
Renum was very useful to me, particularly on my first attempt to implement a chess program in BASICA, where I entered the maximum number lines of code (64k) where it gave me the error:
Out of Memory
I was sure that that damn IBM pcjr had 16k RAM with a BASICA cartridge.
=)!
Just to Peek and Poke Line 110 had to be undoced (a standard business rule). Too bad the blue IBM technical reference with the ASM to at least the interrupt vector wasn't complete (sigh). I donno.. maybe i can order those old skool dox.
mb
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)