FreeDOS 228
Jim Hall writes: "Newsforge [ed. note: Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN]
is running an article
about the FreeDOS Project.
If you don't know: FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system, and is released under the GNU General Public License. It's a good read. From the article: 'But, in the true spirit of Open Source, FreeDOS is not content to be an imitation of the existing technology. ... Open Source talks about freedom to use, but it also means freedom to choose. FreeDOS gives people another choice. If you don't want DOS, try something else. But if DOS might be the key for that special device you are building, check out FreeDOS. It is definitely worth a look.'" We did an interview with Hall two years ago - looks like the project has come a long way since then.
DOS (Score:1, Troll)
Try Cygwin (Score:2, Informative)
for running under windows. If your boss forces
you to work on Windows at work, you can
download Cygwin and have gcc, bash, vi, make, grep,
gawk, sed, sort, bc, wget, etc.
Download the latest Mozilla and you
can pretend your free.
DOS is acutally ok as a pseudo real time operating
system. You can write your code in a tight loop
or have device drivers handle the interrupts properly and actually do things fast enough.It's no substitute for a real time operating system; but's it's good enough for simple stuff. A lot of
"embedded" progamming fits under this category.
Oh really? (Score:1)
GPL DOS? (Score:1, Offtopic)
freedos... msoffice? (Score:1)
freedos -> windows emulation -> msword 6.0 for win3.1?
everyone could just save their docs in word 6.0 format and everyone would be able to read it...
wait... is this freedos thing a virtual machine that runs on top of *nix?
Re:freedos... msoffice? (Score:2)
I seem to remember there being a program called "dosemu" that was bundled with a lot of linux distributions in the past, which could run a virtualized dos session from *nix. In fact it used FreeDOS by default IIRC. I don't know what became of it though.
But FreeDOS itself is a standalone operating system, a drop-in replacement for older versions of DOS.
Recent developments of DOSEmu with FreeDOS. (Score:3, Informative)
Bart Oldeman is maintaining it at this point. In fact, when I last heard, he was also doing most of the recent work on the FreeDOS kernel. It seems that he is quite the coding machine. Almost every night, an announcement would seem to appear on the kernel mailing list.
At the beginning, they used an old image of a hard drive with FreeDOS installed. You would be able to install it with rpm. A while ago, they managed to improve DOSEmu to the point where you don't have to have the image anymore. You could just read off of an actual partition. In other words, you could dual boot into FreeDOS, or use DOSEmu once you boot into Linux.
Pretty convenient if you ask me.
Re:freedos... msoffice? (Score:1)
everyone could just save their docs in word 6.0 format and everyone would be able to read it.
Actually, There was Word 6 for DOS, file compatible with the Windows version. No need for Win emu.
However, you can just save your files in RTF (supported by most word-processors, though it's an MS format). Give the file a .doc extension and Word opens it without complaint.
Ah, DOS... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't B*tch :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Boot disks. A DOS boot disk with fdisk, partition magic, norton, or ghost is still quite useful at times.
Engineering. Lots of engineering programs at univerisity's currently run on older OSes then we'd all like. FreeDOS will allow schools to use older software without having to pay licensing fees for the OS too.
Distribution. It's easier to share old DOS games that no longer work under windows with your
Emulation. Unix people can use this to load DOS programs.
I'm sure I'm probably overlooking most potential uses of FreeDOS but I'm going to call it quits and let the rest of the group figure them out...
boot disks, further implications (Score:4, Insightful)
Special Device Drivers(?) (Score:2)
Re:Special Device Drivers(?) (Score:1)
Last time I checked, FreeDOS cloned the DOS I/O,
infact, the device drivers have the same "interrupt/Strategy" layout,
but it is not the RealThing(TM)
Driving a device requires a hardware interrupt,
and DOS had so many things going on behind the
scenes (MS whoring for some HW vendors, and installing
specialized services for them at secret address.
Take a look at the toshiba CD-ROMs, those things
ran with more than MSCDEX!)
I suggest you stick to MS-DOS for controlling devices,
if it is an specialized piece of hardware.
Use FreeDOS for all your software interrupt handling
You high? (Score:1)
Re:Don't B*tch :-) (Score:1)
A lot of old dos games are pretty damn good, and have a lot of replay value.. (Syndicate Wars anyone?)
Re:Don't B*tch :-) (Score:2)
FSKING CHR$+, what engineer in their right mind hasn't found a way to use GUI for their apps now day?
Last week, I needed dosemu to run an EXE to configure my UPS for an extra battery.
Speaking of DOSemu, it is actually just a real mode virtual box. It needs DOS to actually riun a DOS program. Debian's dosemu package comes with FreeDOS pre-installed for that reason. Since they are able to pre-install FreeDOS, installing dosemu goes from a somewhat confusing and tedious process involving a long search for a DOS boot disk (other than FreeDOS there is not a DOS disk to be found in my house) and a minor license violation to instant gratification and no BSA stormtroopers.
As for games, I do occasionally fire up Duke Nuke'em just because.
Not a DOS webserver? tsk tsk. (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember checking this website out awhile ago on one of my random surf-abouts. I'm quite impressed that they've made such progress since then.
offtopic part: It struck me when I visited freedos.org how many open source websites look similar. Then it occurred to me how the effect is a kind of brand recognition. Or, even a catalog of free software. Neat.
fdisk (Score:3, Informative)
Among other things it recognizes non-dos partitions.
Direct Links (Score:5, Informative)
FreeDOS Frequently Asked Questions [freedos.org]
Re:Direct Links (Score:1)
Blending the sig ad with the karma whore link list, cute. Too bad slashdot doesn't let you have unmatched tags (i assume) or you wouldn't even need that gap in there...
--
Benjamin Coates
Re:Direct Links (Score:1)
However, if you are interested, we will be running banners on OSDN as soon as they accept American Express for payment.
More DOS out there than you think (Score:3, Interesting)
It will interesting to see what the "thousand eyes" does with regards to improving this OS.
Re:More DOS out there than you think (Score:2)
Realistically it's a whole new OS that happens to look and feel like dos as well as having compatability. So it's a whole new quake game when it comes to improving it.
Re:More DOS out there than you think (Score:1)
The software was developed many years ago and was refined over many years, and reportedly works very well. The current plan is to use the existing software exactly as is.
It was originally designed to run on DOS 3.3. I think (ICBW) it'll work on up to 6.22. I wonder where we're going to get legit copies of any of that any more.
I'll look into using FreeDOS. This isn't my area, I'm an electronics hardware designer, but I'm intrigued and I'd love to be able to promote open source.
Current project status (Score:3, Interesting)
After over a decade of work, the project has recreated all of the userland DOS applications including COMMAND.COM, XCOPY.EXE, FDISK.EXE, and many more. The powerful .BAT shell language has been cloned. Even enterprise-level development environments such as QBASIC are complete.
However, the goal of creating a new, next-generation DOS kernel remains unfulfilled. Perhaps the bar was set too high. As of now, the system runs on an implementation of IO.SYS written by some Scandinavian college kid.
Re:Current project status (Score:1, Funny)
Am I smoking crack? (Score:1)
ROFLMAO! Last time I checked, the only thing the fortune 500 company I work uses QBASIC for is to play nibbles.
Re:Am I smoking crack? (Score:3, Informative)
---
Re:Am I smoking crack? (Score:2)
Example: a circuit board assembly plant gets component X-Y locations in many different file formats from many different customers' CAD systems, and had to be converted to the format used by our placement machines. All these were text files in columnar format, but the X,Y coordinates might be in 1/1000 inches or millimeters, X, Y, and part columns could be in different orders, other information might or might not be included, columns could be separated by tabs or by spaces, if space separated the column locations could differ. Nowadays, the machines come with pretty good import utilities, but that wasn't always true. So, I used to write conversion programs. 1st generation was a different qbasic program for every format received; it would read a line, pick out the x, y, and part strings by position using MID$, or by searching for tabs, convert millimeters to mils if needed, then write it out in the machine format. For the second generation, we had a Visual Basic import one of my programs and dress it up with a form where the user identified the x, y, and part columns, so one program handled all formats.
If I have to do something like this now, I use Excel -- it has a pretty good text file import routine -- and then manually rearrange the columns for the output... But in the 1980's, qbasic was a pretty good tool for small jobs. And it was easy to move from that to QuickBasic (a compiler you bought separately), which could do big projects. I wouldn't recommend it for compilers, an OS, or any 100-man project, but for something that took 1 coder a month to a year, QuickBasic was pretty good.
Ah nostalgia! (Score:2, Interesting)
I think my machine came with Win3.1 installed too, but I only ever started it up to laugh at it and watch it crash
It might seem redundant to re-develop DOS, but for games use, it's an excellent OS, since a game will have 100% of the CPU time, all the time! For realtime use too, it beats most modern OS'. I'd imagine it would make a great OS for a SOHO router/firewall, as no-one could login to it from the outside...
Re:Ah nostalgia! (Score:2)
Re:Ah nostalgia! (Score:2)
/brian
Re:Ah nostalgia! (Score:2)
Perhaps I should start a website dedicated to such things?
...
...
That would be cool, and much smoother than moslo(which seems to slow things down in bursts, which is detrimental to performance)
Re:Ah nostalgia! (Score:2)
I think after that I spent the next couple hours pulling out every 8088 favorite and trying them out. I was upset at the # that wouldn't work anymore
Ah...the days when you didn't even need DOS and games just booted from the disk.
Disk operating systems. (Score:2, Funny)
cp/m works great for me, and I see no reason to change. (Seriously!)
Re:Disk operating systems. (Score:2)
DOS is Disk Operating System, as contrasted with Tape Operating System. Pretty generic, actually.
Microsoft has been looking at their hype for too long. The're believing it.
Oh yeah baby. (Score:5, Interesting)
I found the project ~2 years ago, while attempting to
write a DOS extender, and I have been playing with
it ever since.
FreeDOS is only a DOS in that it implements the DOS API,
and does not provide "hardcoded offsets" like commercial DOSes
(for the sane minds, back in DOS, major application
developers disassembled the undocumented kernel
and found what effects of reading/writing/jumping-to
a particular address has on the system. Usually,
those "effects" were interesting features, which
cutting-edge apps made use of.)
FreeDOS does not do that, but it has everything
else DOS had; Think of it like this, it runs SoftIce without a patch or recompilation!
and SICE is a system debugger, that knows way too
much about the kernel.
I tried to hack the kernel by just reading the author's
website -he had an overview of how everything went- but there were no contributing developers.
So dump me (or was it the combination of coffee and teen age?)
I poured on the sources for weeks, without ever
scratching the surface. Then I found "The FreeDOS kernel"
in a second hand store!
Here is where things get interesting. If you ever
hacked DOS, you know what the PSP, UMB, FAT, and
all the other acronyms, which are the hallmarks of poor design and implementation
exposure, are.
Everything is there!
I know Pat is a creative man (I saw his model trains.)
and I know he was targeting the heaps of text
and wetware out there for DOS, but the reimplementation of
everything good and bad about DOS is painfully
ugly.
The chapter on memory management is an example of
this. The memory allocation algorithm is too
complicated for a single tasking OS (sic) just for
the terminology, if not for anything (arenas, banks, segments, overlaying, extending, etc.)
Wait before you point the finger of blame on the
intel architecture. DOS only sees a perfect 16bit
machine, only authors of multi-tasking OSes and
DOS extenders need to worry about memory management
services implemented in the 32-bit part of the
machine.
So all the complexity, is for 16-bits only!
TO spare you the thrill, FreeDOS is an interesting
hackable piece, only if you come from a DOS background.
It could serve as an eye opener for luckier developers
(Java guys I am looking at you.)
Also, for the casual DOS user, it is an excellent
alternative to the realthing (I kid you not, single
tasking is not fun, use sparingly.)
It runs all the important apps, 4DOS, turboC, SoftIce,
several editors, and a host of other well behaving
apps. It even has its own GUI desktop and a web
browser.
Re:Soft-Ice (Score:1)
Why do you say a bunch of old DOS acronyms are the hallmark of poor design and exposure? All OS's have data structures with names. All non-protected OS's have accessable data structures. So what you say is just a non-sequitor.
Re: (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:3, Funny)
Now that we have DOS, we can begin reimplementing our 32bit OS on top of it! We'll wrap it around the DOS core and try and sell people on the idea that its still an advanced OS. Then we can finally acheive the reliability and performace of Windows.
Forgive me, its late....
Re:Awesome! (Score:2)
Way too late. Windows NT/2000/XP stopped using legacy DOS code years ago.
DOS is underrated (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I built my model railroad controller with an embedded 386 and PC-DOS so I'm a bit biased, but DOS still has its place in today's world.
Oh, and to run a DOS PC without a graphics card, just enter (or put in autoxec.bat) ctty com1:. The serial port will be used as console (use mode to set parameters).
Real-time DOS? (Score:2)
You could just as well have used a simple boot loader together with a function library such as libc to get the same functionality.
This is not intended to bash against DOS; DOS might be the perfect choice for many applications. I just don't want people to confuse DOS with actual real-time operating systems.
Re:Real-time DOS? (Score:2)
DOS is overrated (Score:2)
What is so amazing about DOS is how bad its APIs really were and how little it managed to do on what was, at the time, a pretty powerful machine. DOS is really the bottom of the barrel when it comes to operating systems. Yes, having a small single-tasking OS as a choice is nice, but, gosh, would it be nice if it were something, anything, other than DOS.
The real reason for FreeDOS... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The real reason for FreeDOS... (Score:1)
Re:The real reason for FreeDOS... (Score:1)
No, the real reason for FreeDOS would be Heretic.
Re:The real reason for FreeDOS... (Score:2)
Why this is cool... (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyways, I eventually found my old DOS 6.2 disks (took me the greater part of a week) but one of them had gone bad. After another week I found an image of that disk online and finally was able to get the system running. Of course *after* all of that I find out about FreeDOS and I'm currently in the process of moving everything over to it.
But there's an even bigger benefit! I've had such a good time building this system I'm seriously looking into starting a small business building custom MAME cocktail cabinets (people send the old computers and I do the conversion) and now the only software that I can't legally include with the system is the game ROMs. W00t! I might yet be able to make a business out of this!
Main problem with DOS (Score:2, Interesting)
Aside from this problem, a web server running on DOS could be more scalable than *nix or NT. The reason for this is simple: there would be no operating system overhead. An implementatin that eschewed the kernel paradigm, stayed away from threads and processes, could be able to handle a lot of connections.
Re:Main problem with DOS (Score:1)
If we ignore the fixed system variables in MS-DOS,
and speak of FreeDOS as a configurable system,
the your statement wouldn't be as correct as otherwise.
Assuming that the server runs in extended memory,
and the kernel stays in its own real memorys. then the following can happen:
1) the overhead of context switch, from protected
to real mode. That envolves the saving of system
descriptor registors (some "megabytes" there.)
and making a far long jump.
2) each resources allocated by the serves, takes
some "marking" bytes off of the kernel memory, and
in the even of slashdoting, the available memory
will be exhausted and the pointers will wrap around
to low memory (this made intel hackers from the
early eighties weep like girls -- very nasty.)
Re:Main problem with DOS (Score:1)
Ummm... obviously you were never a DOS hacker (Score:2)
Yeah, strictly speaking that's true. But you're probably reading way more into that than reality warrants.
The kernel (particularly a DOS kernel, a true micro-kernel if ever there was one) doesn't need any more memory. Now I'm not one of those who will tell you they used MSDOS 1.0 (when MSDOS 1.0 came out, I was using a computer, but it sure as hell wasn't an x86 toy) but I started using MSDOS at version 3, and I've never seen a version of it that didn't allow applications to access more memory.
EMS allows any application program to access several megs of ram, very easily, through a sliding address translation frame located in high memory, with minimal overhead. This was apparently old hat among the more experienced x86 hands when I joined the club, in the DOS 3.x days, so it's hardly fair to claim that 1mb barrier as a limitation of the architecture.
Nice troll though, most of the readers are obviously completely ignorant of the actual mechanics of DOS.
*sigh* You made me feel old, you suck.
combine these (Score:1)
the name 'FreeDOS' (Score:1)
The FreeDOS people have a great concept and should not leave themselves open to such an easy lawsuit. Their project is worth finishing. I doubt any of us want them to get sued for having a name that sounds like DOS.
Re:the name 'FreeDOS' (Score:1, Informative)
IANAL; but from what I understand in order to have a legal leg to stand on, microsoft would have to have consistently defended the trademark (DOS, in this case).
I think that because of this, all the lawyers for Jim Hall and co would have to do would be to hold up a copy of the free-dos book ((c) 1997, IIRC) as an example of M$ failing to defend that particular trademark and the case would be thrown out of court.
On the other hand, they could also cite DR-DOS and PC-DOS as other examples, too.
Perdida
Re:the name 'FreeDOS' (Score:2)
DOS is not trademarked or trademarkable (Score:3, Informative)
This is silly. DOS is an acronym, standing for Disk Operating System. MS-DOS is just one of many DOSs that have existed over the years. Now PC-DOS was basically MS-DOS, but DR-DOS was an entirely independant codebase. (Well, not entirely, it was developed from CPM by Digital Research who actually owned CP/M, while MS-DOS is derived from a CP/M knockoff called QDOS, but the point is DR-DOS was not an MS-DOS derivative.) But that was hardly the first DOS by any means. AmigaDOS ring a bell? AppleDOS?
I believe the first OS to bear the name DOS actually ran on an ancient (pre-x86) IBM box, but I could be wrong. At any rate, there is no trademark infringement problem with the acronym DOS, it was in wide use well before MS-DOS came around.
Re:DOS is not trademarked or trademarkable (Score:2)
Ah, I stand corrected.
Re:the name 'FreeDOS' (Score:2)
/Brian
FreeDos? (Score:1)
Hey, cool! (Score:1)
I've been unable to use it under Windows because their "DOS box" does not implement the old CPM-style file control blocks. The program runs, you can type whatever you want, and when you save it, it gives no errors, but doesn't save anything. I've had to learn a whole new editor, just to be able to survive.
If this works, I'll be a VERY happy camper indeed! Now, to resurrect my old 84-key keyboard
Re: (Score:1)
learning curve (Score:1)
A pixelized naked woman never looked so good....
FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:3, Informative)
For true near-100% MSDOS compliance, with FAT32 support, multitasking and much more more as well, you want DRDOS-7.03 here [drdos.com]. And no, you don't want the unofficial 7.04 and 7.05 which are actually broken in some respects.
DRDOS delivers really good compatibility, because it emulates most (if not all) MSDOS flaws on purpose. The flip side is, it's not free nor is it opensource.
DISCLAIMER : I used to maintain parts of the DRDOS kernel, so I'm biased.
Re:FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:1)
Re:FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:1)
Re:FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:2)
No need to pirate edit.com; use Nano instead (Score:2)
Also the the IBM EE (Easy Editor) will give you terminal braindamage (pun intended). Warez MS EDIT.COM and avoid at all costs.
If you get edit.com, don't get the edit.com from DOS 5 or 6, as that requires QBasic, can only have one file open, can't edit binary files, and can only edit up to a 64 KB file. You want edit.com from Windows 95, 98, or ME.
If you don't want to pirate anything, you can get DJGPP [delorie.com], which is a port of the GNU system to PC DOS platforms (MS-DOS, DR DOS, FreeDOS) with an i386-series CPU. It includes a port of GNU Emacs. And if you don't like Emacs, there's always GNU Nano [nano-editor.org], a clone of Pico that has also been ported to PC DOS [utexas.edu], or SETEDIT [sourceforge.net], a free clone of the Borland editor for DOS.
Re:FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:1)
ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos/
Re:FreeDOS != MSDOS/Please stop trolling (Score:1)
That's hardly the words of the GPL, is it?
Christ, I thought Cmder taco was going to start cleaning this site up. YOu can hardly read an article around here without some flame-baiting moron trying to spread anti-Free Software propaganda.
I wish to hell that either M$ would take back their astro-turfers or Cmder Taco would take another look at making this a moderated BB.
Re:FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:2)
Everything in DRDOS works on FAT32 except the basic boot process (IO.SYS) and the disk-touching utils. Fortunately the various external commands are smart enough to recognise FAT32 and not touch anything they might mung up. Its FDISK recognises all sorts of partitions (incl. linux), even tho it only makes FAT16 partitions.
However -- I am running DRDOS's EMM386 on this Win95 machine (which boots to M$DOS 7.0) because it provides better/faster/more-stable/less-leaky DPMI support than CWSDPMI. Unfortunately DRDOS's EMM386 doesn't like my newer Tyan motherboards at all -- some conflict in upper memory that EXCLUDE couldn't entirely resolve.
And it sure would be nice if Caldera/Lineo would follow thru on releasing the source -- the current incarnation is SOOOO much better than the OpenDOS 7.01 that they did release kernel source for a few years ago...
Re:What version of CWSDPMI? (Score:2)
I ran a performance comparison back whenever I dragged it home, and found that while performance was identical for pure text apps, the moment video display came in view, DRDOS's DPMI had 10% better performance.
Also, on 3 different systems (M$DOS 6.22, NWDOS7, and Win95 OSR2.0b's DOS7) we demonstrated CWSDPMI to have a memory leak. It chews up both upper memory and XMS. The application using the DPMI support doesn't matter (Emacs was one of those in use, but even running CWSDPMI all by itself will do it). I reported this to CWS (and to someone else who overheard the newsgroup conversation) in tiresome detail and was told "it must be something wrong with your OS". Right, with all three of 'em?? It was very easy to demonstrate on NWDOS, more difficult on M$DOS. But we DID document it.
Have noticed that DRDOS's DPMI and Win95 also *sometimes* eat upper memory and XMS, but at nowhere near the rate nor the consistency that CWSDPMI does.
I backtracked the bug, and it came in with GO32 v2.0 It is *not* in GO32 v1.1.
The PMode DOS extender has a similar problem (only worse), but I didn't bother to track it down. Tho I did record (somewhere!) traceback dumps from its crashes.
DOS4GW does not have the problem.
A free Denial Of Service? (Score:2)
Oops
Re: (Score:1)
Re:A free Denial Of Service? (Score:2)
Challenge for aspiring hackers. (Score:1)
kid can revenge me.
Write a tiny 32-bit microkernel that runs 2 or more FreeDOS kernels,
each in their own virtual 86 mode, and
each accessible through an Fn (function) key.
I personally figured it too late (after I was
forced to modify a Linux kernel for work.)
But it would be cool to have some kid, still at
mom's basement full of energy do this for me, and
tell me I wasn't the only 17 year old who missed
way too many parties, hacking.
Bios updates (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bios updates (Score:1)
freePR0N (Score:1)
Freedom to choose? (Score:2, Interesting)
Open Source talks about freedom to use, but it also means freedom to choose. FreeDOS gives people another choice. If you don't want DOS, try something else
Does closed-source software not offer the same merits? I used DR DOS for a while too. PC-DOS also existed. Then there was GEM vs Windows, and later on we had OS/2. Let's not over-exaggerate the virtues of open-source - next we will be claiming, rightly but superflously, that it low in cholesterol!
For those DSS "testers" out there... (Score:1)
choosey people choose... (Score:2, Funny)
Go edlin!
Great for OS developers (Score:2)
Another use of FreeDOS (Score:1)
By coincidence, that's the first I'd heard of this project in years -- and I just download that program a few days ago. Go figger.
Vmware (Score:2, Interesting)
but i cant run seal. Any basic vga driver ?
And the best thing, we have tab completion, vim, etc.
lredir (Score:2)
What's the reason that lredir can't work with FreeDOS, and is it being addressed?
Re:lredir (Score:2)
FreeDOS is great... (Score:2)
Only game I've found serious problems with so far is TradeWars.. it seems that it needs share.exe to run, and it doesn't like the FreeDOS version of share. Anyone know a way around that problem?
Great use for FreeDOS: Citrix ICA client! (Score:2)
Right now, we run Citrix Metaframe on a "farm" of 6 servers, and employees do 90% of their work from within a Citrix ICA session. Most of their computers are 3+ year old Dell PCs, still running Windows NT 4.0, that have the Citrix "Program Neighborhood" software loaded on them.
Although some people will still need a full-blown PC running Windows because they use AutoCAD or other specialized software packages, the majority of our users just need basic applications that are available to them in Citrix.
We bought 20 Wyse thin clients, in a pilot project to replace older/unneeded PCs with them - but they haven't been too reliable. (I think 6 of the 20 have been back for repair after the first year - and Wyse takes over a month to ship repaired units back to us!) On top of that, they're not really that cost-effective, with the price of regular PCs dropping so low these days.
I realized I could "recycle" a bunch of our oldest PCs (even Pentium 100's!) by loading FreeDOS on them and using the DOS Citrix ICA client. Now, these old machines boot up in 10 seconds or so, right into a Windows 2000 desktop - served by Citrix, and they cost us nothing (besides a Windows terminal server connection license).
Now, the only issue I'm still left with is re-imaging. I tried using Symantec Ghost to make drive images of my FreeDOS/Citrix ICA installation - but when I Ghost it back to a system with a different size hard drive, sometimes it won't boot up. As far as I can tell, FreeDOS must save some type of information about the hard drive geometry in a file when you run a "SYS" command to make the drive bootable. Ghost must preserve this drive geometry data in the Ghost image, causing my problems. (If I boot from a bootable FreeDOS floppy and do a "SYS C:" on a freshly Ghosted drive that isn't booting, it works fine after that.)
Re:heck yeah (Score:1)
Re:heck yeah (Score:2)
Brix [epicclassics.com]
Coolest. Puzzle Game. Ever.
Re:Why FreeDOS? (Score:1, Funny)
I dunno. Maybe because it seems to irk trolls?
Re:Why FreeDOS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why FreeDOS? (Score:1)
Re:Why FreeDOS? (Score:1, Insightful)
The above post was marked as "Interesting" by Slashdot moderators.
Ahem.
There's nothing at all interesting about stupidity, ignorance, and narrow-mindedness. Please make a note of it..
MS-DOS/XP - Pay Close Attention (Score:2, Funny)
Open 'My Computer'.
Right Click on your Floppy Disk Icon.
Select Format.
Click the button that says "Create an MS-DOS startup disk"
Format the disk.
Look at that, you have a DOS disk!
(Of course, this feature doesn't exist according to the average slashdot user, since XP is too busy giving out all your personal information, crashing, refusing to run any software, reporing you to the FBI, shutting itself down, keeping track of everything you do and going out with your girl when you're not looking.)
Re:Will cygwin run on that thing? (Score:2)
Re:why not use stripped down Linux instead? (Score:1)
go read the site and find out what free dos is good for. the two good links would be the about [freedos.org]page and the main [freedos.org] page.
here's a hints: it's good for running dos software [sourceforge.net] on a free version of dos.
yes, you could use linux to do all these things, but dos is so simple. =)