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.)

Re:Good to hear this

[ScrewMaster]

I agree, and embedded systems running some variant of DOS are very common. I've delivered more than a few of those myself. Claims that "DOS is dead" aren't really accurate, and won't be for some time to come. Speaking of DOS games, would you happen to know if Build Engine games such as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood and so forth work under FreeDOS?

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

[Tatarize]

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.

I care, sort of.

[Jett]

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....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I use freedos on a daily basis

[Wierdy1024]

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:Good to hear this

[caseih]

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.

*ahem*

[absurdist]

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....

[Bing Tsher E]

And the beauty of a lightweight OS that uses the 32-bit flat memory model and has the 'hooks' for multitasking integrated should be apparent to some of us.

I mean, the multitasking sounds optional. A flat memory model would be really, really great for high performance tasks where you just want the core machine.

Re:I use freedos on a daily basis

[mottie]

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)

Freedos writes OS2 Warp floppy disks

[Penicillus]

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...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

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.

Re:Good to hear this

[NormalVisual]

Many modern programmers are terrified of having to code to the bare hardware, and many act like it's always a bad thing.

On the other hand, some of us welcome any chance to do so, and have stuff like the Windows DDK, and PIC, 8051, Z-80, and other emulators laying around in our toyboxes. If you don't know what an 8255 is without having to look it up, you probably shouldn't be programming PC hardware directly. :-)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It's effectively dead...

[caseih]

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.

This is simply not true. I know of quite a few developers still working with embedded systems using DOS. And no it won't be replaced with ELKS or ucLinux anytime soon. DOS works and works very well in this niche. Serial port communications, harward control, even POS, etc. The DOS embedded world is alive and well.