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.)
Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:2)
Re:Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:2)
Reading TFA for one thing.
Re:Maybe I'm missing something... (Score:2, Insightful)
>spliffy@sarge:~$ apt-cache search freedos
>...
>dosemu-freedos - FreeDOS package for DOSEMU
>Seems they have.
Or maybe not. You are running sarge. Software that's twelve years old would still be considered a bit on the new side of things. I, for one, am surprised it made it out of testing so quickly.
Good to hear this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
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.
Re:Don't forget... (Score:2)
How about a P133 with a VESA-compatible video card?
Re:Don't forget... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:2)
Re:Don't forget... (Score:2)
It probably does, there's a NetBSD package [netbsd.org]...
Re:Don't forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Don't forget... (Score:2)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
Agreed, but software emulators make it *so* easy to bang out & do some rough testing of code quickly without having to go to a lot of effort in setting everything up or downloading code every time you make a change, and modern PCs are fast enough so that you don't have to wait 30 minutes to run 10 milliseconds of machine time anymore.
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
I always found the 8255 had too few features, too many problems, and too large a footprint.
Just some 3-state drivers and octal latches plus the odd 74LS139 usually did the job much better!
Re:Good to hear this (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
You may want to consider DOSBox [sourceforge.net] instead.
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
Re:Good to hear this (Score:2)
how's about Free95? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:how's about Free95? (Score:2)
Why? (Score:3)
(Oh, and also because FreeDOS running in a VM plays some wierd DOS games very well.)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
http://alma.ch/blogs/bahut/2005/04/cloning-xp-with -linux-and-ntfsclone.html [alma.ch]
If you have piracy in mind, note that Windows own protections will mess things up when you reboot on the new hardware -- this is a good way to backup windows after you have just spent a day installing software, however.
Obligatory joke, forgive me... (Score:2, Funny)
I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:2)
Re:I use freedos on a daily basis (Score:2)
And Jay Leno drives around in his steam-powered, wood-fired car often... but steam cars are still dead.
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 deve
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Man, I can't wait for this to come out!! (Score:2)
Re:Man, I can't wait for this to come out!! (Score:2)
Yeah, but will it support (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah, but will it support (Score:2)
Real geeks use(d) Stacker and QEMM.
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:It's effectively dead... (Score:2, Insightful)
Any recommendations for a replacement method for BIOS flashing?
Re:It's effectively dead... (Score:2)
The way I did it is just download a WIN98SE boot disk from bootdisk.com and burn the image with Nero (using the "boot cd option" (the Floppy was not working), then i added the AMI flashing utility an
Re:It's effectively dead... (Score:2)
Yes, DR-DOS, as I already said in my previous post. Under FreeDOS, you're really taking the risk that your flashing app might crash, destroying your hardware.
Besides that, most hardware companies have stopped using DOS flashing programs (for good reason). Many of them are Win32 these days, so you absolutely NEED a WinPE/BartsPE CD or USB drive (or Windows on a 1GB hard drive, or similar).
Re:It's effectively dead... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 n
Re:It's effectively dead... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:2)
Freedos writes OS2 Warp floppy disks (Score:5, Interesting)
I think FreeDOS is genius: (Score:3, Insightful)
Open-source too?
A very useful project!
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
Very usefull for flashing a BIOS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Very usefull for flashing a BIOS (Score:2)
Re:Very usefull for flashing a BIOS (Score:3, Insightful)
How is the fact that FreeDOS is GPL'd possibly a benefit? You're running a closed program, to update the closed firmware, on your closed hardware.
DR-DOS is both free as in beer, and the source is freely available, though certainly not GPL-compatible (neither is qmail, but that hasn't stopped people from using it).
DOS IS NOT DEAD (Score:2)
Re:DOS IS NOT DEAD (Score:2)
I will be the first to complain that Linux isn't ready for primetime as a desktop replacement OS, but as an embedded environment, it is absolutely brilliant.
Consider that anything with a microprocessor has been hacked to run Linux, its the obvious choice for embedded applications. I know someone that is working on a CNC controller that is using Linux and can actually run a visual environment on the controller for more advanced managment and control of CNC jobs. All you would get with
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 recal
Seems to me... (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but with what do you bait your breath - worms?
And just what are you hoping to catch?
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
so Sens youv got. nothin beter too dew then ignoure teh relivant parts-of-teh-post, and fokiss ownly on typographikal errs er othar misstaekes; then heers a hole "mesage four, you two tier apart. Hav phun. O, & Git a liefe looser.
Lift your game Blixel! (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Lift your game Blixel! (Score:2)
You failed to distinguish my part of the post from your part of the post.
Re:Lift your game Blixel! (Score:2)
I should be punished.
Slap me, beat me, knock me to the ground, make me feel cheap!
Re:Lift your game Blixel! (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Funny)
Interesting quote from a draft dodger.
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Insightful)
For an example of a REAL courageous anti-war indiviual, click here [medalofhonor.com]
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, FreeDOS. Sorry, my mistake.
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Insightful)
A 32-bit multitasking DOS could still be "light-weight". Remember DESQView [wikipedia.org]? I can't imagine(*) it would be all too difficult to add some sort of a supervisor to manage multiple DOS sessions. Any DOS box (box as in hardware) running an Expanded Memory Manager (such as EMM386) is already on its way there as the EMM continues to run DOS in V86 mode.
(*) In my imagination, there's a mysterious genius out there who understands every nuance of DOS and I86 hardware who's more than willing to put time into this
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
I think Digital Research had a multi-user version of DOS, supporting up to 16 users on one machine.
Anybody care to elaborate/supply more information ?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
> Hall says that software will include
> features like multitasking and flat memory
Throw in windowing, and you would have FreeDesqView-386.
sPh
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
*ahem* (Score:5, Interesting)
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.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
You'd be better off with... (Score:2)
Most "high-performance" programs you write in full-on flat mode do this anyway. They either coordinate via the timer, vertical retrace, or hard drive/sound card DMA fill-request interrupt. And then they run a set of "tasks", that is, a bunch of potentially unrelated functions, in order, then return to the main busy loop.
So why not a small, RT kernel that lets you structure you program into seperate modules? It might provide you with some nice memory/s
Re:You'd be better off with... (Score:2)
"Real-time" allows for getting things done within fixed latency. It requires some very tricky programming techniques and creates so much overhead that you need really good hardware to keep it running without failure. Of course it has all kinds of safeguards to make the failure recoverable, but all it really does is granting that the real-time process won't be waiting for its
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
Or "uses", of course.
But networking in DOS, like just about everything else in DOS is still ugly, limited and painful. And if you remove the need to support a legacy application, it's usefulness approaches zero.
I can go on for hours if you really want me to list everyone who cares about FreeDos....
And I could go on about the what I see as my wasted years in the DOS world, to say nothing of the first few generations of Windows. To be fair, you are correct
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:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
There's also Arachne (works okay, tho its setup is quirky as hell) and its offspring WebSpyder, which used a 32bit DOS extender, and worked really well (at least, b
Finally? You must be kidding/trolling. (Score:2)
Ever hear of SLIP or PPP? How about an 8 bit network card?
None of these things are new. I was running ethernet on an XT running X11 ( via desqviewX ) at least 15 years ago.. might have been longer..
I care, sort of. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let me be the first to ask.... (Score:2)
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.
FreeDOS on other platforms (Score:2)
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'
Re:FreeDOS on other platforms (Score:2)
I think the ContikiOS mentioned in the response below is probably as close as anyone is going to get to a lighter-than-Linux "universal DOS."
Re:this is good! (Score:2)
jonof.edgenetwork.org [edgenetwork.org]
Re:Yawn... and this belongs in the ??? category... (Score:2)
I can see FreeDOS used with things like Parallels for Mac OS X so people can run old DOS software if they want.
Re:Version 1.0 due out soon? (Score:2, Funny)
What else?
Re:Version 1.0 due out soon? (Score:2)
edlin (Score:2)
Imagine my surprise when MS-DOS 6 shipped without edlin.