FreeDOS 1.0 Released 365
Noksagt writes, "FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be 'a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement' and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support."
Bootability (Score:3, Interesting)
USB Bootability (Score:5, Informative)
While most old BIOS aren't able to boot from a storage class usb device unlike modern one, there are drivers like DUSE and others [bootdisk.com], that enable the access to USB devices on those oldies.
So one could make a generic "boots DOS with USB support" bootdisk / bootiso and use it everytime you have to flash some BIOS / Firmware and want to save the new ROM on a USB stick. (The combination "USB BootISO + ROM on a stick" come VERY handy when flashing floppy-less boxes).
Front-ends :
A open variant of GEM (huh... Seals ?) is included in the "larger" distribution of FreeDOS.
Also, for those who need a small box just to surf the web, no need for a full graphical environnement, there stuff like Arachne [cisnet.com] (full graphical browser, GPL. Description at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]).
Great for a surfbox, and the old 386 on which you'll run it doesn't draw as much power as a Pentium 4.
hooray! (Score:5, Funny)
Installer needs work... (Score:4, Informative)
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I got Master of Magic working under DOSBoxwithout error... except for occasional discoloration/color inversion, which in turn I remember seeing even with DOS 6.22, so it isn't an issue.
And it's DOSBox 0.63, for I haven't bothered upgrading yet.
Re:Installer needs work... (Score:5, Informative)
Note: Virtual PC does not "break" Aero. Windows Vista is explicitly designed to PROHIBIT Aero and serveral other parts of the operating system from operating if you attempt to use unapproved unsigned drivers or attempt to use any sort of debugger or attempt to use any sort of virtualisation mechanism or attempt to exert control over your computer in any way whatsoever.
Why?
Because if you were allowed to do any of that then you might be able to get around or modify the DRM schemes woven throughout the Aero desktop and other areas of your computer.
So it's not so much a problem with Virtual PC breaking Aero as it is a deliberate effort by Microsoft to sabotage Windows and deliberately selfdestruct Aero, and other Windows systems, against Virtual PC and against any other similar software.
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FreeWindows 3.11 (Score:5, Funny)
This is exciting that we have a FOSS and functional equivalent of MS-DOS 6.22 (with some other features like long file names). I can run my old DOS games on my Mac with QEMU. Now, I wonder when somebody will get started on FreeWindows 3.11?
ReactOS? (Score:2, Informative)
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I'm positive they had a licence for Win 3.x.
Dos 1.0?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dos 1.0?? (Score:5, Funny)
They did beat Hurd out of the gate, though.
Why no link to the site? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why no link to the site? (Score:5, Funny)
How is this useful? (Score:2)
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Ok, so how is Free-DOS any better than Dr. DOS which I have heard is a lot more stable than Free-DOS or even spending less than 20 dollars to get a geniune version of MS-DOS 6.22 and running that in your emulated PC environment? I still see no real gain to using Free-DOS over anything else that is available, especially just getting a copy of the real thing. I see no area that usin
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So... since YOU don't need it, no one else does, either? OK. I can play that game, too.
I have a Mac, and no use for Windows. Therefore, no one else should have Windows, either.
There. Now we've solved all of the world's problems.
I'd like to see more focus... (Score:3, Informative)
1. A means to boot a machine, load network drivers, protocol stacks and maps drives so I can run Ghost.
2. Other things like updating BIOSes
#1 is at the top of my list, obviously. Boot disks are pretty important. Bootable USB thumb drives and bootable CDROMs are good too. Need'm all. Seems like everywhere I look, things still seem to favor the Win98 DOS... it's annoying because I don't want to use those. For lack of a better term, I'd like to see more "marketting" focus on creating boot disk packages that people can use. Make'm as free as BSD so hardware makers can use them without worry. Philosophy be damned if all it does is make people nervous and hire lawyers, or worse, not use what is available because they simply don't understand it and can't afford a lawyer.
So if it were more available and better packaged, I think we'd get more than better acceptance of it, we'd get something of a clammoring for it.
No longer in development, but still powerful... (Score:3, Informative)
This is what I've been waiting for! (Score:5, Funny)
Old Dos Music Apps Can't Be Beat (Score:5, Informative)
The Linux Dos emulator Dosemu [dosemu.org], uses FreeDos. Dosemu is extremely easy to install and use, and once you do, you have access to all the old Dos music applications that have now been released for free.
These include Sequencer Gold Plus [voyetra.com], and, if you don't like the tracker interface, the CMU Midi Toolkit [cmu.edu], which allows score info to be entered in a text file.
A lot of these original Dos programs really haven't been beat, and when combined with Linux and a modern soundcard and midi/soundfont instruments -- you can have a pretty robust home music setup.
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I dunno man (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I'll grant you, you can get the DOS programs for free, professional apps are expensive. However I think it's misleading to say the DOS programs "haven't been beat." I think they have, badly. That's no knock on them, there's only so much you can do when 4MB is a large program and you've maybe half that much RAM. However that's not a problem anymore, and it's nice to see what you can do with a modern system. Sure it's cool to see a MOD player with a robust cubic resampling engine to pitch shift a single note several octaves without distortion. However it's even cooler to have a 5GB sample bank that doesn't NEED pitch shifting, because all the notes have been recorded individually.
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Sure it's cool to see a MOD player with a robust cubic resampling engine to pitch shift a single note several octaves without distortion. However it's even cooler to have a 5GB sample bank that doesn't NEED pitch shifting, because all the notes have been recorded individually.
Trackers create and play their own samples. Soundfonts, however, are samples. They are loaded directly into the soundcard, where they are available to be used by a sequencer, keyboard etc.
The two examples cited above -- Sequence
nostalgia (Score:2)
no more mounting folders and general dinking around with DOSbox! Only dinking around with the real thing! Ahh the thought that I will soon see beautiful CGA graphics brings a tear to my eye. Alleycat as god intended it... sniff
Good job, guys! (Score:5, Insightful)
Will it run bioforge? (Score:2)
32 bit DOS extender? (Score:2, Funny)
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http://dos32a.narechk.net/index_en.html [narechk.net]
Yaah boo sucks to the naysayers (Score:2)
Until recently, I was a FreeDOS user. I used it on a P100 laptop to connect to my Commodore 64 (the version of the connector cable I have requires a single-tasking OS). Is that a mainstream use? No, not by a long chalk. Is it a useful use? Well yeah, to me it definitely was. The C64 is turned on once in a blue moon to play the odd g
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Wonder what grade Tanenbaum would give them ? (Score:4, Interesting)
what grade would you get for rewriting DOS 15 yrs later, and would it be higher or lower than the Hurd guys get for taking 20+yrs to get to 0.2 (but doing it the "right" way, with a microkernel) ?
"5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU" - Andy Tanenbaum, 1992
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What a smart-assed comment. What's your point? That you think that you (or the FreeDOS guys) know more about OS design than Tanenbaum? I doubt that very much. Tanenbaum wasn't saying a microkernel was the "right" way. He was saying it was the modern way.
It took less than a year for two guys to build the Wright Flye
But... (Score:2)
Serious question: (Score:2)
Screenshots (Score:3, Funny)
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C:\>
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C:\DOS> cd run
C:\DOS\RUN> cd dos
C:\DOS\RUN\DOS> cd run
C:\DOS\RUN\DOS\RUN> _
Flashback (Score:2)
"Now with EMM386!"
Umm, yay?
AM-100 Datalogger (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
Some BIOSes are include builtin flashing utilities that do not require one to boot into DOS.
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Re:Moo (Score:5, Funny)
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What one does with it -- install it on an Apple-branded PC vs. a big-box PC vs. a whitebox PC -- is up to the person who purchased it.
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10.5 will be available as universal binary, but you will still need to download the "modified for all PCs" version, unless you can figure out how to do it.
Re:Moo (Score:5, Funny)
Not when my questionably elected, somewhat appointed, congressional representatives get done with them!
Re:Moo (Score:5, Informative)
I agree it's a bit of a PITA but there's a zillion free downloads that include one version of DOS or another. I've had great luck with the extremely roundabout method:
Now, on one hand this is probably illegal by the terms of the EULA, which probably says you can use this copy of DOS only to run whatever utility. (Seagate, for example, will provide you with DOS on a floppy or CD image, in order to deliver unto you the hard disk utility they licensed. It's a very nice one actually.) On the other hand, who gives a shit? The only thing wrong with this method is that it's beyond many people.
The real solution is that all BIOS manufacturers need to implement loading BIOS flash files from, at the very minimum, floppy, ISO CDROM, or MS-DOS format USB device, partition 1. This would eliminate this whole thing. I guess if it came down to it they could always just let you do that by putting FreeDOS into BIOS :)
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Necromancy (Score:5, Funny)
I guess it's rather the time for exorcisms now.
Re:Necromancy (Score:5, Informative)
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Heh. I hear ya.
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Best. Word. Processor. Ever!
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You'd be surprised (or perhaps dismayed) to know how many old crawling horror DOS applications there are out there in use. My boss uses this abomination of a program for creating master key systems that was written in Turbo Pascal back in the 80's. He recently paid $60 for the newest "upgrade" (last year!), but the thing is still written in TP, and still cannot be made to print to anything other than LPT1. I wrote a look-alike, work-alike windows app in two weeks
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If your talking about windows you can use the net use lpt1:
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Yeah, that was the guy's "fix" also. Unfortunately, it requires several network services to be loaded, some of which conflict with the function of my Idiot Employer's dialup networking configuration.
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Did you try the "new printer" - Connected to this computer locally, no plug and play - make a new port - TCP/IP - DNS name or IP of printer - then install the printer?
I've found windows printers tend to pretty much always work better if they assume they're directly connected, and the fact that you can lie and tell windows a tcp/ip connection constitutes the same thing as an rs232 plug to be very convienient. When you install a network printer it tends to bitch a lot and want to check and make sure the prin
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I emailed the guy who wrote (and still sells) the software that he ought to be distributing it with VirtualPC combined with DOS, if he's not going to re-write it in a non-toy language.
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Heh. Yeah, I did make the mistake of not making it look like a DOS text-mode app. I figured (incorrectly) that he'd appreciate not having to cursor around a non-intuitive text-based interface and use the space bar to fill in "check boxes", but instead be able to use the mouse on REAL check boxes. Eh, no great loss. He's an idiot. I did it for the fun of programming it, mostly.
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Hmm.. next, i'm sure, comes FreeDows, but that name would just be too corny.
You mean ReactOS (Score:2)
The ReactOS developers would probably agree with you, which is part of why they chose the name "ReactOS" for their Windows clone.
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The fact it works as a desktop ( with some additional software ) even on the oldest of 'pc' hardware is just a great side effect.
Re:Where does this fit into the map? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Where does this fit into the map? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you almost certainly COULD get along using DOS as your home system these days. I'm at a loss as to why you'd want to, but it's not impossible. To get a decent range of functionality, however, WILL require that you use commercial software, not least to get an IP stack. Once you've done that, there's some old NCSA applications that support it, like telnet and even lynx.
If you want networked email, go looking for a very old version of pegasus mail for DOS; I think you can get POP3 but I doubt you can get any SMTP authentication methods whatsoever, although I guess you could manually pop-before-smtp or something...
The best use for DOS IMO is to run a BBS, but then, who wants to do that any more?
The most common use for DOS ATM is to run industrial control applications, because as pathetic as x86 is, doing x86 DOS assembler is really quite easy and was for a long long time by far the cheapest way to get anything done in terms of control systems. In fact most of the computer-driven machining equipment I've seen, even new stuff purchased in the last five years, is often DOS-based. There's a dinky, crappy PC inside a metal enclosure that probably cost more to design (per unit sold anyway) than your whole PC, and it's usually got some kind of interface board. The software is frequently still written in assembler because you may well neeed per-cycle accuracy to run your stepper motors or what have you.
The second most common use for DOS today is probably doing flash BIOS updates on PCs too stupid to load their BIOS without an additional program load.
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No, you don't.
http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/freedos-lsm.cgi?q=
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I've used NetTamer, Arachne, and WebSpyder in DOS, all worked fine. NetTamer has a version that will run perfectly well on an XT.
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Even that is a stretch. DOS was good because it had a very low footprint and would allow more resources for the BBS, but if you wanted a BBS these days you be much better off with Linux or *BSD... especially if you were writting one from scratch. I mean, with *nix you've already got your modem/session/authentication/multitasking code done for you. YOu just have to write a console app.
A boot disk to do some low level stuff to
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Have a look at Arachne http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/ [cisnet.com], a fully graphical browser/email client/even a desktop if that's what you want.
As it happens, my entire business runs in DOS.
DOS dieth not !
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This prints a little smile in the upper left corner of the text screen
Nostalgia (Score:5, Informative)
I actually know how to break that down... B800:0000 is the start of the ASCII video memory. First 0x1 is the smiley, next 0x1 is dark blue on black. 0x21 is !, 0x7 is light gray on black.
The memory is 4000 bytes long (longer if you use a bigger mode than 80x25) with 2 bytes for a screen tile. First byte specifies extended ASCII character (charmap.exe with font Terminal will show you all characters > 0x20), second specifies the color.
All colors that can be used are: 0 = black, 1 = dark blue, 2 = dark green, 3 = dark cyan, 4 = dark red, 5 = dark purple, 6 = brown, 7 = light gray, 8 = dark gray, 9 = light blue, A = light green, B = light cyan, C = light red, D = light purple, E = yellow, F = white. Note that the first nibble is the background color, second is foreground. By default, if you specify a background >= 8, subtract 8 to get the displayed background. The foreground will blink. Not sure what mechanism overrides this to allow "light" backgrounds, but I've seen it done.
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Someone put a tonne of effort into it, and you should have some respect for that at the very least.
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Re:Not exciting... (Score:5, Informative)
I wish I knew how you people find moderators dumb enough to mod this kind of crap up.
DOS is still heavily used in industrial control, with new programs being written for it every day. In fact, literally tens of thousands of computer-driven machining tools are running DOS right now as they run through their paces. DOS is literally the most popular OS in this space.
If people want to keep using those machines, and they're smart, they'll back up the programs right now, and burn them to a CD with a copy of FreeDOS. Someday they won't be able to find hardware their original DOS runs on. Of course, a lot of them just load from floppy, so all THOSE people need is a floppy image; they can burn it to a CD and boot from that someday when they can't find a 386 or a 1.44MB floppy drive for less than a hoijllion dollars.
Re:Not exciting... (Score:5, Informative)
Forgetting the embedded space for a moment, I downloaded FreeDOS 1.0 yesterday just for the heck of it, and installed it on an old P166 laptop I had lying around. I dumped a bunch of MP3 files onto it, and immediately began playing them with the included MPXPlay package. It took a while to get TCP/IP working on a 3COM 3C575 Cardbus adapter, but once that was done I had a nice DOS system with browsing, email, and a ton of other stuff.
As a matter of fact, FreeDOS is organized much like a typical Linux distro (even uses some of the standard DOS disk tools that come with most Linuxes) and includes a lot of applications if you get the full download. Memory management is very good: right out of the box it got more conventional RAM than I ever got with QEMM in years past. Some of the utilities are still a bit lacking in support for FAT32 and LFN, but overall a very useful package. Jim Hall and other contributors to the project are to be commended for their efforts.
DOS is as obsolete as the internal combustion engine.
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There's also a lot of people who write embedded applications in DOS or DOS-like OSs. Having an open source alternative to aging, poorly supported closed-source OSs is good news to them.
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It's nice for legacy stuff - I had a client once that ran a QBASIC application and we had to set up a couple more machines for him. FreeDOS was nice and legal, since I had no idea how to buy a license for MS-DOS. It's not like you can walk down to the store and buy DOS these days.
I have an unopened copy of DOS 6.22 around here somewhere, but it's buried in a box, most likely. Probably next to my 70 NT4 Workstation
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And if DOS is important to you (as it is to many, many people and companies) and completely open-source GPL'ed version that is beyond Microsoft's reach is certainly a good thing.
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Don't care (Score:2)
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They wouldn't have the poop for running Vista, now, would they.
Re:Where does that leave Linux? (Score:5, Funny)