FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent

Lisa writes "Jim Hall, creator of the open source MS-DOS operating system project FreeDOS, says that while work on the project may have slowed recently, he isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet. In fact, Hall says he hopes to see version 1.0 released as soon as the end of the month." (So rumors to the contrary can be safely ignored.)

Maybe I'm missing something...

They haven't released anything in 12 years and its that lack of "recent" progress that's hurting them. What is it that I'm missing?

Re:Maybe I'm missing something...

They actually have released several versions over the past few years. Although, recently, they have been a bit slow to realese new versions, over the past year or so. FreeDOS is functional and can be used to do things including run many older DOS titles. I think they have been saving the 1.0 version for a point where they have obtained a very high level of compatability with MS-DOS.

I have used FreeDOS to run several programs, and it is useable for many tasks, although it still does have some way to go before it is a perfect imitation. Nevertheless, I am glad to see it is still progressing, since I do think there is a use for this kind of thing.

Good to hear this

I have used FreeDOS previously and indeed it has quite a bit of importance and valuable to use, both as an OS for older hardware, and as well, for running old DOS software games on newer hardware. I have run FreeDOS on Bochs for nostgalgia's sake, to run various old DOS titles. A fully MS-DOS compatable OS does indeed have many applications, such as running older software, nostgalgia, preservation of old computer operating systems, and for older hardware and modern hardware for which a small, lightweight OS is needed.

Don't forget...

Check out DOSBox [sourceforge.net]

It's an excellent DOS emulator for Windows, Linux, MacOSX, BeOs, FreeBSD, OS/2 and toasters... Wait, it might not run on toasters. You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.

Re:Don't forget...

A few problems.

1. It doesn't work.
2. Have you ever, you know.. used Linux? It could be my memory playing tricks, but I can't for the life of me recall the "Run in Compatibility Mode" to run my DOS games in Linux.

Re:Don't forget...

Check out DOSBox (...) You may need to do a little fine tuning, but I haven't found a better way to run old DOS games.

Good old Dosemu works pretty well for me, especially on a Pentium III @ 750 MHz. I've heard DOSBox requires several GHz to acceptably emulate a 486DX2 @ 66 MHz. Dosemu does not emulate the CPU, so it is an order of magnitude faster.

Dosemu used to be hard to configure and used to require root privileges and direct acces to the hardware; recent versions have pretty much gotten rid of those problems. I run most of my games with xdosemu in a regular window, I can easily switch to full screen if I prefer, I get very nice MIDI thanks to ALSA + Sound Blaster Live, etc. Of course the experience depends on the games, some of them had funky ways to address the hardware, there are a few cases where Dosemu doesn't cope that well (jerky mouse in a few games). But I can play Day of the Tentacle, Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Master, Lands of Lore, Arkanoid, Ecstatica, the Elder Scrolls: Arena just fine, and that's just those I tried this past week-end.

Re:Good to hear this

I still run several DOS applications and even piddle around with my old PowerBASIC compiler in FreeDOS running under DOSEMU. DOSEMU works very well for most things (non-graphical) and runs several orders of magnitude faster than bochs (no emulation of the cpu). FreeDOS and DOSEMU are a great match. Plus all the years of Unix innovations in the command line have been incorporated into the FreeDOS shell, makeing DOS actually quite nice to use in all its 16-bit glory. For graphical DOS stuff, I use dosbox which has it's own DOS implementation but, like bochs, emulates the hardware as well (but is way faster than bochs) and allows sound and vga emulation for running the old Sierra games.

FreeDOS still has a bright future in several niches. There is still a need for a 16-bit, real-mode operating system in a number of embedded situations.

this is good!

It means I can still play Duke Nukem 3D until DNF comes out. At least I don't have to worry about any lack of overlap in the DN releases...

how's about Free95?

Once we've gotten up to FreeDos 6.2, will the next release be Free95 (release date 2095), which replicates Windows 95 in a feature and bug-complete way?

Why?

Because.

(Oh, and also because FreeDOS running in a VM plays some wierd DOS games very well.)

Obligatory joke, forgive me...

Netcraft [netcraft.com] confirms it: FreeDOS is dying!

I use freedos on a daily basis

I use freedos on a floppy, with NTFSdos pro, to do some handy scripting changing registry entries on windows boxes without booting them. No other way I can thing of doing it, other than a liveCD of something, but that negates the point, as everything must fit inside about 4MB for my purposes. Also, occasionally, use a network freedos floppy, but I'm annoyed at the lack of a "universal" ethernet driver - even if performance is slow - rather like the universal 640x480 video driver in windows. Also, support for SATA drives is poor at best - and I can't find a driver for most chipsets. (although having said that even the windows XP install doesn't find most right!)

Re:I use freedos on a daily basis

Also, occasionally, use a network freedos floppy, but I'm annoyed at the lack of a "universal" ethernet driver - even if performance is slow - rather like the universal 640x480 video driver in windows.

It's just not possible to have a universal NIC driver. Videocards all impliment SVGA and VESA compatibility, but networks cards don't have any similar universal standard.

Still, probably a handful of different NIC drivers will handle 95% of ethernet cards you'll come across. Tulip, NE2000, RTL8139, SIS900, 3C905, etc.

Re:I use freedos on a daily basis

Floppies are dead. Put BartPE [nu2.nu] on a USBkey or on a creditcard cdrom and you have way more functionality and you can add any driver [reatogo.de] with ease (if there's not already a plugin built, which there are a LOT of)

Re:I use freedos on a daily basis

Apparently floppies aren't dead as this person uses them often.

    There are lots of older PCs that don't have a working CD and tons more that don't have usb ports, or don't have a bios capable of booting from USB.

Man, I can't wait for this to come out!!

Now, if only someone will come up with a decent window-manager and GUI toolkit to run on top of it...

Yeah, but will it support

DoubleSpace?

It's effectively dead...

Even if he's still going to make another few releases, FreeDOS is still dead.

MANY, MANY years into the project now, and yet compatibility with MS-DOS is in a rather sad state, the partitioning/formating programs create corrupt partitions that MS-DOS/Windows will choke on after a little bit or writing to. Many of the programs (Defrag?) still can't even handle FAT32, even though FAT32 has been around forever, and is largely obsolete now. What are the chances of FreeDOS 2.0 adding NTFS support?!

DR-DOS is still freely available, and a much better choice for boot floppies/CDs, as well as running old DOS programs (something like xmess will probably include 100% DOS compatibility before FreeDOS does).

DOS is too old and simple to be of any use in embedded apps as well. Projects like ELKS and ucLinux are far better options. It might be usable by companies' boot disks, but the limited compatibility might make licensing one of the many commercial DOS implimentations a cheaper and more reliable option.

The project is a zombie. It can continue walking on, but it's still long since dead, whether it knows it or not.

Re:It's effectively dead...

And when did DOS support NTFS?

You completely missed the point. It's not about what DOS has done in the past, it's about what it needs to do to become a useful and viable OS in the near future.

FreeDOS isn't some retro-programming experiment, trying to make old games work on old hardware. It's niche has been for Windows boot disks, and for use in dual-booting. But with 2000 and XP defaulting to NTFS, you'll see FreeDOS no longer working properly for either job, just as older OSes with only FAT16 support have gone away as well.

In the next few years, as Microsoft gets a clue, and it becomes easier for average people to create WinPE/BartsPE boot discs, DOS will become a distant memory... Just as distant as CP/M is now.

In Other News...

...Calls to participate in an open-source replacement for Windows 3.11 / Windows for Workgroups are now being heard...

Visual Basic for MS-DOS

I will have to throw together a Bochs environment sometime soon and try running Visual Basic for MS-DOS under FreeDOS. Because I can. And because it's a pretty cool 'dead-end' product from Microsoft, to be honest.

Freedos writes OS2 Warp floppy disks

A long time ago, I copied my OS2 Warp installation CD to my hard drive; the CD is now someplace safe. In February, I used FreeDos to make OS2 Warp disk images from the hard drive, and installed OS2 onto an old 486. When the OS2 disk creation program is run under MSDOS 6, 7, or Win98 the 1.88 meg installation disks are created occasionally, and with agony; the dos window format of W2K and XP won't touch anything over 1.44 megs. FreeDos writes the 1.88 meg format easily on normal HD floppies, and all the floppies work the first time. Thank You FreeDos Developers!

Yawn... and this belongs in the ??? category...

A few things come to mind... 00. Will the project never get released if there is pre-release press about it never coming out? 01. Will the dozen or so users/developers bail out if there is bad press after release 1.0? 10. Is there actually anyone interested in using FreeDOS instead of a ripped/stolen copy of the real thing? 11. Is the FreeDOS project really cleanroom, or can we expect M$haft to come and stop this before it really starts. There are more questions to be asked, but I'm not sure I really care all that much other than to post something that makes me sound smarmy and cute. I'm still laughing at this post, and have to ask is the news day so slow today that this kinda stuff makes it out of OSNews and into /.-land... To be discontinued.

I think FreeDOS is genius:

Everything you need to boot an XT PC onward to today's PCs, format and/or do system installs?
Open-source too?
A very useful project!

Urgent : System requirements

Freedos 1.0 better have a working version of EDLIN. DOS just isn't DOS without EDLIN.

LiveCD FreeDOS distro in alpha stages

From the new UDOS site on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/udos):

uDOS is a free operating system built on the FreeDOS kernel with DJGPP. uDOS provides an integrated suite of features inluding Perl, Python, etc., as well as a Watt-32 based networking environment and ELF library support. Can be run live from CD image.

Discussion for UDOS currently takes place on irc://irc.freenode.net#djgpp

UDOS does a great deal to demonstrate what DOS tools are still out there, as well as the bugs they have! Many problems reported with the CD bootup involving LFN support, EMM386, etc. Not sure *nostalgia* is the right word for this kind of thing, but hey whatever... :)

Ah, and the ELF support isn't in just *yet*, pending release of DJGPP 2.04 so that the ELF patches can be made part of the core compiler as 2.05 (the last thing people need are *two* DJGPP distros). Now DJGPP just needs a release manager. Any takers?

Very usefull for flashing a BIOS

FreeDOS is the only way to flash a BIOS using Free Software. Never mind the slow release cycles, it already works and it has helped me upgrade countless computers, without a single copy of MS-DOS on hand.

DOS IS NOT DEAD

To all you lusers out there that think dos has no value, you are way wrong. I know there are many industrial applications like CNC where it is still in very common use. From my own experience I can tell you that it is *THE* platform for scan guns and automatic inventory management used in wherehouses and large reatial shops. Chances are pretty good if you have ever purchased anything in a large reatil store chain, or that has spent time on a self in a wherehouse it was scanned with a handheld scanner runing you guessed it DOS\>

Multibooting DOS, Linux and Windows

DOS is one of several operating systems that I have installed and can boot-up into on my AMD Athlon 64 3800+ computer. I actually have PC-DOS 2000 [wikipedia.org] (instead of FreeDOS) installed on the first partition of my first harddrive, it is a FAT-16 partition. When booting up, a menu appears that allows me to choose whether to boot up into Windows 2000, PC-DOS 2000. or one of several different versions of Linux. PC-DOS 2000 was a minor Y2K upgrade of the Last version of DOS that IBM had released. As you may recall, Microsoft and IBM each had their own versions of DOS since back in the 1980's Surprisingly, my AMD Athlon 64 can run more than just 64-bit software. I don't recall if DOS is 16-bit software or what, but it runs just fine on my AMD Athon 64.

The obvious question is why would anyone want to run DOS on a modern computer? Well, I have fond memories of tinkering with batch files, DOS commands and old DOS games back in the late 1980's and early 1990s. Every once in a while, I like to re-experience the retro experience of what it was like to run DOS. I do not boot-up into DOS very often, but I am glad that I can choose to boot up into DOS once in a while when I want to. Of course Linux, Windows or almost any other modern OS is actually better on a modern desktop computer for everyday use.

I actually have a mixture of Free-DOS and PC-DOS 2000 installed on the fat-16 partition. If I remember correctly, I did that by installing FreeDOS first and then later installing PC-DOS 2000 on top of it. Afterwards, I then manually edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to remove any wierdness that resulted from istalling both that way. I had a slight preference for the PC-DOS 2000 but doing it that way gave me all the extra free software and some Linux/Unix like commands that come with the FreeDOS. Am I the only one out there who occasionally boots his AMD Athlon 64 3800+ up into DOS?

There are actually several choices for running old DOS programs. One choice is Free-DOS [freedos.org]. Another choice is DR-DOS/OpenDOS [drdosprojects.de] which, if I understand correctly, is a commercial product in which the source code of the kernel has been under an Open Source license. Another alternative is to run the free DOSBox emulator [sourceforge.net] under Windows or Linux. Using DOSBox I have been able to run old DOS games such as "Commader Keen" under Linux and even managed to get my USB joystick and modern soundcard to work with it. Yet another option is to use VMWare to create a virtual machine for FreeDOS and run it in a virtual machine under either Linux or Windows. Even though their are other alternatives, I am glad to see that the FreeDOS project is still alive and about to release version 1.0.

FreeDOS isn't done till....

Windows 3.1 won't run....

Seems to me...

Seems to me that Q[&]DOS was written faster than this, and with less advanced development tools twenty-five years ago. I guess coders are just getting soft these days.

Best name?

Best name for a FreeDOS fork?

a) CheeDOS
b) DoriDOS
c) TostiDOS
d) FriDOS

Free

FreeDOS is actually bundled along with some HP laptops as this allows HP to say that they are selling a PC with an OS (which is necessary) to use the PC.

I understand that this is the only way, some companies can formally afford to unbudle windoze and other such products while selling new computer.

Should be reason enough to use freedos.

End

Re:Let me be the first to ask....

Yes. Embedded systems vendors, firmware upgrade disk image producers, people who like the simplicity of DOS, PC manufacturers who want to get around Microsoft's refusal to OEM-licence windows to them if they sell PCs without any Operating System (Microsoft has a big, nasty industry campaign against "naked PCs"...). There'll be a niche "market" for FreeDOS pretty indefinitely, it's pretty much the "last DOS standing", since Microsoft gave up on MS-DOS. No, not _many_ people will care. But with Open Source, a few are enough.

Re:Let me be the first to ask....

You're the kind of nay sayer that says that since Duke Nuke'em: Forever has been in production for the last decade it probably isn't worth caring about.

I, for one, wait with baited breath for FreeDOS 1.0, and Duke Nuke'em: Forever... which will be out "when it's done." (Read: Any day now.)

Anybody who says waiting for vaporware is like watching grass grow is just crying over spilled milk the cow jumped over the moon the queen of heart of the problem child. ... Apparently there might be some psychological drawbacks to waiting on such things.

Re:Let me be the first to ask....

Everyone that builds network imaging boot CD's does.

Freedos rocks. Tcp/ip stack and all the goodies to make imaging machines from a network image repository with ghost of other dos based imaging apps a real treat/breeze.

universities love freedos, researchers do as freedos works on old Pc104 386 based boards for space based or rugged terrain data collection on hardware that the only collection app is an old dos one that will not run under linux. most machine shops love freedos as it's the only way to keep those old machines that use dos running instead of buying new CNC hardware and software for tens of thousands of dollars when the old machine works just fine.

I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....

*ahem*

You know, it would be nice if people would actually bother to do a little research before they post...

If you'd bothered to even glimpse at the FreeDOS web page, you'd see that the first priority of FreeDOS is and always has been to maintain a lightweight, completely DOS compatible OS. FreeDOS-32 is a completely different project. Any multitasking extensions (think DR-DOS in its latter days), GUIs (FreeGEM, notably, among others), etc... have always been planned after and as an adjunct to FreeDOS, not to replace it. There's still plenty of life left in DOS and the DOS environment. I for one would love to see a high-performance, single-user OS optimized for modern hardware without the cruft of the NT based MS OSs OR Linux.

Re:Let me be the first to ask....

Does this mean that I can finally get my PC XT on the Internet?

If you have an 8-bit NIC, sure... If not, the TCP/IP stack won't do you any good, and you just need the old SLIP/PPP programs for DOS.

SSHv1, Telnet, FTP, etc. There's even BOBCAT for a lynx-like browser, except that it's somewhat painful on an XT, and crashes after every ~20 pages you visit (out of memory).

It was only a couple years ago I still had an old 286 up and working this way. Not for any good reasons, mind you, just for the hell of it.

I care, sort of.

At work we found an ancient "portable computer" built by Compaq - we couldn't find any installer disks old enough to work with it so we installed FreeDOS. It wasn't really useful for anything, but it was fun - especially since most of us are young enough that if we have used DOS it was when we were children. Everyone was amazed that we got the old beast working. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who needs DOS for something, if only an hours entertainment...

Re:Let me be the first to ask....

Anyone who needs to reflash their BIOS might be interested. I bought an amd64 machine, running gentoo and never purchased anything from Microsoft. So when it comes time to flash, I need to make a bootable cd/disk. And for that, I use FreeDOS.

Re:Let me be the first to ask....

For playing legacy games on new systems it should be an excellent choice, shouldn't it? they may be old but games like the Dommander Keen series, Doom (yeah, I know, Linux and Windows ports exist and have for some time), and many, many other older DOS games are still just as much fun to play now as they were back when they were new.

Let me be the first to answer...

Yes, a lot of people care.

DOS still has a large user base out there, espcially in the embedded and machine controller markets. So yes, people care.

FreeDOS on other platforms

Everyone here seems to be concentrating on FreeDOS running on x86. Which is fine -- x86 is the dominant architecture, after all, but I'd be really interested in a stable, minimalist OS that would run on other architectures as well -- perhaps architectures that there aren't any open-source OSes available for right now.

I'm thinking particularly about the old Apple machines (II series); it would be cool to get an OSS operating system and application stack (compiler, etc.) for some of the platforms that wouldn't comfortably run Linux.

Maybe even cooler than the Apple IIs (for which it's not terribly hard to find software for anyway) would be something that would run on some of the old minicomputers. Not sure how practical/possible it would be to target something designed for x86 for them, but if it's anywhere near feasible, it would be neat (if only from a geek perspective).

Re:Version 1.0 due out soon?

C:>_

What else?

Re:Version 1.0 due out soon?

Version 0.99