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FreeDOS 1.2 Is Finally Released (freedos.org)
Very long-time Slashdot reader Jim Hall -- part of GNOME's board of directors -- has a Christmas gift. Since 1994 he's been overseeing an open source project that maintains a replacement for the MS-DOS operating system, and has just announced the release of the "updated, more modern" FreeDOS 1.2!
[Y]ou'll find a few nice surprises. FreeDOS 1.2 now makes it easier to connect to a network. And you can find more tools and games, and a few graphical desktop options including OpenGEM. But the first thing you'll probably notice is the all-new new installer that makes it much easier to install FreeDOS. And after you install FreeDOS, try the FDIMPLES program to install new programs or to remove any you don't want. Official announcement also available at the FreeDOS Project blog.
FreeDOS also lets you play classic DOS games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, and Jill of the Jungle -- and today marks a very special occasion, since it's been almost five years since the release of FreeDos 1.1. "If you've followed FreeDOS, you know that we don't have a very fast release cycle," Jim writes on his blog. "We just don't need to; DOS isn't exactly a moving target anymore..."
FreeDOS also lets you play classic DOS games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem, and Jill of the Jungle -- and today marks a very special occasion, since it's been almost five years since the release of FreeDos 1.1. "If you've followed FreeDOS, you know that we don't have a very fast release cycle," Jim writes on his blog. "We just don't need to; DOS isn't exactly a moving target anymore..."
Serious question: besides playing DOS games, is FreeDOS used for anything like industrial controls or embedded OS' or other stuff?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Does it work with older machines? I'm not yet ready to update my 286. Maybe next year.
DOS was the base operating system for the computers your dad used before he met your mom.
The computer my dad used before he met my mom was called a slide rule.
The operating system was himself.
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For those who don't know, DOS stands for Disk Operating System. DOS was the first PC operating system that really became popular. (CP/M didn't really take off.) Microsoft's MS-DOS was the popular operating system in the 1980s and the early 1990s, until Windows95 in 1995.
I used DOS all the time when I was growing up, and into my college years. In 1994, Microsoft talked about how they were working on the next version of Windows, and that version of Windows would do away with MS-DOS. But if you remember Windows 3.11, Windows wasn't great. So I decided that if Microsoft was going to "kill" DOS, we should create our own to replace it. So we created FreeDOS.
You can read more about it on our website, or on Wikipedia.
What was great about DOS is simplicity of taking over every part of OS functionality and customizing it to your liking. Keyboard and timer interrupts can be intercepted with a half of page of assembly and made to do cool things. Writing a character on screen is as simple as writing one byte for character code and one byte for color at a known memory address. Floppy drive controller can be trivially reprogrammed to write 1.36MB to a 720K floppy.
I think a true successor of DOS would enable similar extent of tinkering in today's world. Raspberry Pi is cool for playing with GPIO pins. But writing a kernel module is a major undertaking and the next kernel upgrade will more likely than not break the interface that you are relying on. And, in user space, systemd is the step in the wrong direction from ease of tinkering with shell scripts.
Not a fan myself, but a lot of people seem to like Python. Imagine a linux distro where every userspace command is a well commented python script that you can start editing and debugging to learn and change how everything works, with some kind of snapspotting mechanism to recover from a bad edit. Then have a generic kernel interface that can delegate device control to userspace processes. A lot more people will then start contributing to technology rather than just being frustrated by it.
The computer my dad used before he met my mom was called a slide rule.
My dad had a real computer. She shared a room with the secretary.
Nope, it's not only x86 but requires an IBM PC/XT/AT compatible BIOS, so I don't think it could even run on non-PC compatible x86 systems such as the original Xbox or the current one.
You can likely make a 64bit DOS, or a flat-memory 32bit native one - at least one such one exists, it's just that no existing software will run.
On random ARM and non ARM systems? I believe you're going to recreate a "DOS" and applications from scratch every time, for every different combination of hardware i.e. for every single different SoC. It would be worse than with CP/M? where you had to port for every machine, but at least you targeted a single CPU, Intel 8080 (or Zilog Z80).
Powershell? That's a tall order. You have to port or recreate a goddamn .NET runtime. It might be impossible or by that point you're creating a whole OS on top of your DOS, like Windows 3.1 and 9x. Meanwhile, you can run Powershell on linux so the boring anwser to that is to use the smallest linux distro or build with enough components to run .NET and Powershell.
The closest thing to a universal DOS might be running code in a UEFI environment, which none of what you quoted supports but it does exist in ARM land, perhaps only on servers.
The best bet to run FreeDOS on a tiny system is to shop for a 486-compatible SoC, where you will get GPIO, PWM and some other features. If it's compatible with DOS but does not have video output you may be able to use a serial console in place of keyboard/monitor (which will likely work fine with the command prompt and e.g. text adventure games, but text mode stuff assuming you have CGA/VGA might fail. Although a TSR might be able to emulate text mode on vid cards?)
Not really. WinQuake and GLQuake were win32 executables, and only worked on Windows NT and Windows 9x. I ran both on Windows NT 4, which wasn't in any sense a DOS program. Windows 95 used DOS as a bootloader, but then ran its own drivers, scheduler, and memory manager (DOS didn't support protected mode directly). It did thunk to DOS for a few things, but it's not really accurate to call it a DOS program.
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