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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."
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
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.
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.
its a complete OS, that is modeled on MSDOS. It fits well into the embedded market. It also works well for old legacy applications where you really cant upgrade the custom hardware or the software ( like in machine controlers ).
The fact it works as a desktop ( with some additional software ) even on the oldest of 'pc' hardware is just a great side effect.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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
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.
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/
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."
This is for running MS-DOS programs on your StrongARM NetBSD box, inside of Bochs.
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.
Actually, you almost certainly COULD get along using DOS as your home system these days. I'm at a loss as to why you'd want to, but it's not impossible. To get a decent range of functionality, however, WILL require that you use commercial software, not least to get an IP stack. Once you've done that, there's some old NCSA applications that support it, like telnet and even lynx.
If you want networked email, go looking for a very old version of pegasus mail for DOS; I think you can get POP3 but I doubt you can get any SMTP authentication methods whatsoever, although I guess you could manually pop-before-smtp or something...
The best use for DOS IMO is to run a BBS, but then, who wants to do that any more?
The most common use for DOS ATM is to run industrial control applications, because as pathetic as x86 is, doing x86 DOS assembler is really quite easy and was for a long long time by far the cheapest way to get anything done in terms of control systems. In fact most of the computer-driven machining equipment I've seen, even new stuff purchased in the last five years, is often DOS-based. There's a dinky, crappy PC inside a metal enclosure that probably cost more to design (per unit sold anyway) than your whole PC, and it's usually got some kind of interface board. The software is frequently still written in assembler because you may well neeed per-cycle accuracy to run your stepper motors or what have you.
The second most common use for DOS today is probably doing flash BIOS updates on PCs too stupid to load their BIOS without an additional program load.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
A few years ago I got an old 386 laptop from a pawn shop and, in my quest to find something useful to do with it, I stumbled across a program called Arachne that provided a reasonably full-featured graphical web browser as well as email and other miscellanious 'net functionality for plain ol' DOS. It's not free, but IIRC the shareware version wasn't overly crippled.
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.
To get a decent range of functionality, however, WILL require that you use commercial software, not least to get an IP stack. Once you've done that, there's some old NCSA applications that support it, like telnet and even lynx.
:)
d &a=net :)
No, you don't.
http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/freedos-lsm.cgi?q=
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
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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
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
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.
Even that is a stretch. DOS was good because it had a very low footprint and would allow more resources for the BBS, but if you wanted a BBS these days you be much better off with Linux or *BSD... especially if you were writting one from scratch. I mean, with *nix you've already got your modem/session/authentication/multitasking code done for you. YOu just have to write a console app.
A boot disk to do some low level stuff to a PC is about the only use for DOS these days. And even then it makes me cringe. It seems like such an insult to modern hardware to boot an OS designed for the 8086 CPU.
-matthew
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
FreeDOS has a feature Linux lacks, DRIVE LETTERS!!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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
You can do all the internet and email (yes, including authenticated SMTP) in DOS.
Have a look at Arachne http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/, a fully graphical browser/email client/even a desktop if that's what you want.
As it happens, my entire business runs in DOS.
DOS dieth not !
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.
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.
See also http://fdisk.com/doslynx/
I've used NetTamer, Arachne, and WebSpyder in DOS, all worked fine. NetTamer has a version that will run perfectly well on an XT.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
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 ]