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..."

Comments

Question

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Serious question: besides playing DOS games, is FreeDOS used for anything like industrial controls or embedded OS' or other stuff?

Re:Question

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've seen it used as a platform for firmware updates.

Re:Question

[0100010001010011]

industrial controls

Yes.

There are still a lot of CNC machines from the 80s out there running every day. I worked at a shop in 2000 that had machines from the 80s. Short of them completely failing I can't see any reason they'd replace them with anything newer.

The XPCs made by Mathworks/SpeedGoat also have a bare bones DOS and a parallel port you can use to bit bang IO before launching the Simulink-RTOS

Re:Question

[_merlin]

Yeah, that's the one thing it's kinda useful for in my world. Often you have a choice of DOS or UEFI environment to install firmware updates on things like expensive NICs and storage controllers. And to be frank, UEFI implementations suck, ranging from incomplete to unusably buggy, so you're often better off just using FreeDOS.

Re:Question

[Jim Hall]

Serious question: besides playing DOS games, is FreeDOS used for anything like industrial controls or embedded OS' or other stuff?

We ran a survey a few years ago, and most people use FreeDOS for three things:

1. Playing DOS games

2. Running legacy software

3. Developing embedded systems

That survey is about five years old now. These days, I'd guess 90% of people using FreeDOS are using it for playing DOS games. And of course, those of us who just like to tinker on DOS as a hobby.

I guess we could add a fourth one to that list too. As others have said, a lot of people use FreeDOS to install firmware updates on computers. That's a good use for FreeDOS too!

Re:Compatibility

[Jim Hall]

Does it work with older machines? I'm not yet ready to update my 286. Maybe next year.

I know you're joking here, but yes you can run FreeDOS on an older PC. FreeDOS should run on an 8088, but I don't know anyone who actually has a working one these days. A few folks have emailed me as recently as this year to say that they run FreeDOS on a '286. So in fact, the '286 example you gave is possible!

But how you'd install FreeDOS 1.2 on an old computer like this will be interesting. The FreeDOS 1.2 release has a CDROM installer, or a boot floppy + CDROM installer, or a USB fob drive installer. You can't use any of those on a '286 computer. So the three people who have a '286 will probably transfer FreeDOS 1.2 packages to the '286 by copying them to a floppy and unzipping them.

In 2016, we know that most people use FreeDOS in a PC emulator like VMWare or VirtualPC or QEMU. I use it in QEMU. We recommend the CDROM installer for emulators.

Re:DOS?

[Jim Hall]

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.