FreeDOS Not Dead; 1.0 Release Imminent 196
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.)
Good to hear this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Don't forget... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
It's effectively dead... (Score:5, Informative)
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:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:4, Informative)
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:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Visual Basic for MS-DOS (Score:1, Informative)
Let me be the first to answer... (Score:4, Informative)
DOS still has a large user base out there, espcially in the embedded and machine controller markets. So yes, people care.
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:3, Informative)
I work at a small BioTech company. We use a lot of "obsolete" equipment because a) it's *much* cheaper than the new stuff and b) it does what we want anyway.
This is why we like projects like FreeDOS. For example; we use BioMek 1000's for liquid handling - they cost us about $1,000 each compared with $20,000+ for the newest kit. The problem is that the s/w runs on DOS... do we have DOS installation disks? Nope! Enter FreeDOS - it works fine *and* it runs happily on the old PC host.
Thank you FreeDOS developers - you just saved us a whole load of money which we can put into research instead.
LiveCD FreeDOS distro in alpha stages (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Informative)
windows 3.x in 386 enhanced mode could multitask dos apps but at least for games it didn't work anywhere near as well as native dos. 9x was much better at it but your already getting pretty bloated by that point (and i certainly don't call 9x an early version of windows).
also iirc tcp/ip using the windows stack from a dos app was afaict a pita (ID software reffered to it as a delicate balancing act and iirc there was a seperate windows helper app).
Multibooting DOS, Linux and Windows (Score:2, Informative)
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.