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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."
~writes new MS-DOS compatible apps~
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 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.
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.