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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.
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.
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
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.'"
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!
I actually know how to break that down... B800:0000 is the start of the ASCII video memory. First 0x1 is the smiley, next 0x1 is dark blue on black. 0x21 is !, 0x7 is light gray on black.
The memory is 4000 bytes long (longer if you use a bigger mode than 80x25) with 2 bytes for a screen tile. First byte specifies extended ASCII character (charmap.exe with font Terminal will show you all characters > 0x20), second specifies the color.
All colors that can be used are: 0 = black, 1 = dark blue, 2 = dark green, 3 = dark cyan, 4 = dark red, 5 = dark purple, 6 = brown, 7 = light gray, 8 = dark gray, 9 = light blue, A = light green, B = light cyan, C = light red, D = light purple, E = yellow, F = white. Note that the first nibble is the background color, second is foreground. By default, if you specify a background >= 8, subtract 8 to get the displayed background. The foreground will blink. Not sure what mechanism overrides this to allow "light" backgrounds, but I've seen it done.
Couldn't agree more, probably because I've spent about twenty-odd years in industrial control. The embedded world runs a Texas shitload of DOS, and the arrogance of people that assume that if it doesn't run from a hard disk and have a GUI it's obsolete just astounds me. FreeDOS claims that it can be ROMmed ... if so, it's a viable replacement for a lot of expensive industrial DOS clones out there (datalight and others.) People just don't realize the sheer number of embedded systems that support their lifestyles, they really don't.
Forgetting the embedded space for a moment, I downloaded FreeDOS 1.0 yesterday just for the heck of it, and installed it on an old P166 laptop I had lying around. I dumped a bunch of MP3 files onto it, and immediately began playing them with the included MPXPlay package. It took a while to get TCP/IP working on a 3COM 3C575 Cardbus adapter, but once that was done I had a nice DOS system with browsing, email, and a ton of other stuff.
As a matter of fact, FreeDOS is organized much like a typical Linux distro (even uses some of the standard DOS disk tools that come with most Linuxes) and includes a lot of applications if you get the full download. Memory management is very good: right out of the box it got more conventional RAM than I ever got with QEMM in years past. Some of the utilities are still a bit lacking in support for FAT32 and LFN, but overall a very useful package. Jim Hall and other contributors to the project are to be commended for their efforts.
DOS is as obsolete as the internal combustion engine.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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'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.
FreeDOS has a feature Linux lacks, DRIVE LETTERS!!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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 !
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.
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 ]