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Programming IT Technology

FreeDOS 228

Posted by michael from the when-autoexec.bat-was-king dept.
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.
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FreeDOS

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  • DOS (Score:1, Troll)

    by alfredo ( 18243 )
    I would rather work in DOS than Windows. Windows gets in the way of productivity

    • Try Cygwin (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Cygwin is a collection of Unix program
      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.

  • I thought windows let people copy dos, i thought they released the patent? But i highly doubt that they made it open.

  • GPL DOS? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 )
    At half the price, it would still cost two-times too much...

  • 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?
    • wait... is this freedos thing a virtual machine that runs on top of *nix?


      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.
      • 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.


        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.
    • 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.

      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)

    by sailracer6 ( 262434 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @01:50AM (#3016915) Journal
    That brings back memories. The article asks, "When was 270MB enough for anything lately?" When I had a 20MB drive on my hand-me-down Leading Edge XT - and that was big. Really though, this is good. I've been watching them for some time, and their project can only become more useful as Microsoft makes sure that it's impossible to get a DOS license. Open source developers are interestingly enough the only people protecting the world from obsolescence. It's a shame Linux isn't really installable in its modern incarnations on any machine older than a 486, but good old minix is still available at http://www.minix.org [minix.org]. Remember, this was Linus' base for linux. Minix, unlike DOS, is already fully TCP/IP ready... there is a good site describing how to get on the internet using an XT and Minix. Also, minix.org reminds me of the way linux.org looked about five years ago, pre-commercialization.

  • Don't B*tch :-) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lw54 ( 73409 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @01:51AM (#3016917)
    Before people start griping about why on earth anyone would want DOS now days, keep in mind there are many things FreeDOS would be useful for.

    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)

      by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:14AM (#3016974) Homepage Journal
      Like I just posted over on the newsforge forum, this would be a godsend for companies that use DOS for their firmware/bios/eeprom flash utilities (perfectly understandably, you don't need or want the memory protection of something more sophisticated than DOS if your goal is to do dangerous, illegitimate, obscene things to various memory-mapped fiddly bits ;-) ). Why? The ability to distribute fully functional dos disks without license hassles, because more and more mainstream i386 users are losing the ability to boot to DOS (i.e. they're transitioning to NT-based Microsoft products or Unix-based things).
    • I use several DOS-only apps to drive some computer-controlled radios and radio scanners. Also, many 2-way radios I use are programmed with DOS applications that talk to the radio via a serial cable. I was beginning to sweat some things, since DOS (and DOS-capable machines) is harder and harder to find. This will be a great help for many of my projects!
      • I wouldn't wet my pants over this yet.

        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 :-)

  • Not a DOS webserver? tsk tsk. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by whereiswaldo ( 459052 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @01:52AM (#3016921) Journal
    "The site www.freedos.org is running Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.1.1 FrontPage/4.0.4.3 on Linux."

    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)

    by belg4mit ( 152620 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @01:55AM (#3016927) Homepage
    I have found their fdisk to be most useful.
    Among other things it recognizes non-dos partitions.

  • Direct Links (Score:5, Informative)

    by lw54 ( 73409 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @01:56AM (#3016930)
    This project has been going since 1994. Congrats to the FreeDOS team! I don't think I could have watched technology go by for 8 years and still work on the same project...

    FreeDOS Frequently Asked Questions [freedos.org]

      • Domain Registration and Renewal for $12 a year

      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
      • Actually, it's just a coincidence. The Tier Networking blurb is part of my sig which has it's own HTML unordered list. I have a +1 Bonus but have never used it because I don't want people to think I'm only posting to advertise my business. IMO, my link is no different than the thousands of other users with other website sigs.

        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)

    by GeorgeTheNorge ( 67545 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @01:59AM (#3016935) Homepage
    Our company still uses DOS for production line control, because there are some great legacy apps, and it is STABLE.

    It will interesting to see what the "thousand eyes" does with regards to improving this OS.

    • Well first the whole OS has to be reverse engineered and fully functional to the extent of the original before it can be improved upon.

      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.
    • My employer is reviving an old product, which is a sophisticated industrial process controller based on a PeeCee.

      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)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:01AM (#3016941)
    For those too lazy to read the article, here's a summary of the current project status:

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know you're just being silly, but they started in '94, not '91. And calling .BAT a powerful language is just a crime against humanity. ;-)
    • Even enterprise-level development environments such as QBASIC are complete.

      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)

        by einstein ( 10761 )
        sigh... I used to work for a large "We'll do your taxes and keep most of your refund" company... you guess which one. There were utilities they would give us tech workers in the field to manipulate some tax return data to convert it to another format that was written in qbasic. I was amused and very frightened at the same time.
        ---
        • I've written a number of data conversion utilities. Often it takes less than 100 lines, and qbasic was pretty good for these little projects because there is no overhead to starting the program, and because basic has always had pretty good string handling. If it looked necessary to process the input byte by byte, or if a lot of data was going to be cranked through it, I'd use c because it runs faster, but often qbasic did the job in about the size of a c "hello world" program.

          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)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 )
    You know, I can still remember getting my sweaty paws on my first 486dx33 with 4MB RAM, 1MB graphic card and huge 40MB hard-drive. This was a real "power-user" machine when I spent almost 3000 quid on it :-) Since I used to write in nothing but assembler, it was astonishingly fast after my little sinclair ZX spectrum (which did me proud for many years). I remember saving up to double the RAM so that Doom would run better.
    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...
    • Yes, it was inelegant, and clumsy, and 16 bit, but near the end it was extremely fast and really stable. I still have fond memories of 6.2.
  • Y'know, I'm getting a little pissed at this Microsoft acting like they have the only disk operating system in existence.

    cp/m works great for me, and I see no reason to change. (Seriously!)

    • Seems like IBM had DOS for the IBM/360. This was before PCP which was before MFT which was before MVT.
      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)

    by sinserve ( 455889 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:15AM (#3016977)
    Finally, and slashdot story I know everything about :-)

    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.

    • Actually, Soft-Ice can run on any real mode OS with no problem. It can even be used to debug the BIOS or boot sector with no OS loaded. Thus, being able to run Soft-Ice on freeDOS does not indicate a level of MSDOS compatiblity for freeDOS.

      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.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Awesome! (Score:3, Funny)

    by jasno ( 124830 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:20AM (#3016996) Journal
    Finally the beginnings of Open Source(tm)'s domination!!!

    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....

  • DOS is underrated (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:23AM (#3017001) Homepage Journal
    I guess what most people don't realize is that DOS is really a great way of running programs (note that I don't say OS), especially on very slow CPUs. DOS is real-time, and it has next to no memory or CPU overhead, so it's well suited for embedded real-time apps. Now that we have a free DOS we can build highly reliable embedded systems, because as DOS has a small code base, it's easy to audit, increasing reliability over (WRT that special task) bloated Unices.

    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).

    • The only reason why DOS can be considered real-time is that it completely stays out of the way. DOS has the nature of a code library more than an operating system in that DOS only provides services in the form of extra system calls. It does not provide multi-threading, inter-process communication, timers, interrupt handling with controlled latency, or other things that normally are considered RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) services. DOS is not an RTOS, it is just a boot-loader for your own real-time programs.

      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.
      • Correct. DOS is good for doing ONE thing at a time -- it loads the program and stays out of the way. A real time OS allows many programs and threads to run at the same time, while guaranteeing that the threads designated as high priority get to run within a certain time. Windows and most unixes multi-task, but don't guarantee that the motor-control thread will get executed again before the thing has run off the end of the track...
    • There used to be plenty of single-tasking operating systems. There also were, and still are, plenty of small, real-time multitasking operating systems. What you call a "slow CPU" and may even be limited to 16bits could easily run BSD UNIX or Smalltalk.

      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)

    by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:27AM (#3017010) Homepage Journal
    DOOM, DOOM and more DOOM.

  • Why this is cool... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aquaman616 ( 131268 ) <bhallNO@SPAMfigleaf.com> on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:29AM (#3017014) Homepage Journal
    I'm currently working on a MAME cabinet and when I was first setting up the software I determined that DOS was going to be my best bet (most stable, and I have a lot of DOS experience). It made sense to keep what is essentially going to be an embedded solution as simple as possible...

    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!
  • The main problem with DOS is that it runs in real-mode, and therefore has a 1mb addressable memory limit.

    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.
    • No!

      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.)
    • Of course the memory model would have to be different, switching between real and p-mode would sucl. Maybe run in "Real Big Mode".

    • The main problem with DOS is that it runs in real-mode, and therefore has a 1mb addressable memory limit.

      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.

  • Desqview [cjb.net] This was posted in an eariler slashdot article. A small window manager that was really good at its job. An X11 gui that sits on dos. Might be fun to combine this and FreeDOS.
  • Perhaps they should take a page from the trouble that 'Lindows' is having. The issue, if you're not familiar with it, is that MSFT is suing the people who are making and selling Lindows (a open source Windows-compatible OS) for using a name the sounds like 'Windows' for profit. The thing is, MSFT might win this one because Lindows IS using a name that sounds like 'Windows' for profit.

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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
      • If anyone has a trademark for DOS, it should be IBM. IBM had some sort of Disk Operating System called DOS used for transitioning from second generation to third generation mainframes. DOS ran on IBM mainframes long before anybody even thought about "Personal Computers".

    • 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.

  • I wonder if this project has anything to do with the spread of the actual DOS 6.22 source code a while ago ...
  • I'll have to try this out. If it works right, I might even be able to go back to using my old favorite word processor / text editor, Wordstar 3.3.

    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 ... :)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Without DOS I would have been ever lost in the command line world of Unix. Thank you DOS for helping me understand extended and expanded memory, and knowing what IRQ's and DMA's were so I could make a custom boot disk perfectly suitable for Leisure Suit Larry 3.

    A pixelized naked woman never looked so good....

  • FreeDOS != MSDOS (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jesse Duke ( 559062 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @02:48AM (#3017056)
    As the article points out, FreeDOS aims at being better than MSDOS, which mean that it'll never be 100% MSDOS compliant, simply because half of MSDOS is broken.

    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.

    • I found IBM's PC-DOS 2000 really nice. I didn't notice any incompatibilities, and it has a powerful builtin REXX and a nice editor :)
      • PC-DOS *is* MSDOS, only under a different name, maybe with a few different utilities.
        • No it's not. The tree branched after 3.3. IBM PC-DOS 4.0 and MS-DOS 4.0 were different animals, based on the same code tree. The differences became more pronouced as the trees separated.
    • It is free, and was recently released open-source:
      ftp://ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos/
      • from license.txt @ ftp.lineo.com/pub/drdos:
        This Agreement has three parts. At least two parts will apply to you. Part I ap plies if you have not purchased a license to the accompanying software (the "So ftware"). Part II applies if you have purchased a license to the Software. Part III appli es to binary license grants to the Software within the categories of Part I or Part II. If you initially acquired a copy of the Software without purchasing a license and you wish to purchase a license, contact Caldera, Inc. ("Caldera") on the Internet at http:/www.caldera.com or call +1-800-463-7367.


        PART I -- TERMS APPLICABLE WHEN LICENSE FEES NOT (YET) PAID TO CALDERA (LIMITE D LICENSE FOR EVALUATION USE) ONLY.
        Caldera grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in source or bin ary form free of charge if your use of the Software is for the purpose of evaluating whether to purchase an ongoing license to the Software. The evaluation period f or use by or on behalf of a commercial entity is limited to 90 days; evaluation use by others is not subject to this 90 day limit but is still limited to a reasona ble period. If you are using the Software free of charge, you are not entitled to support or telephone assistance. If you fit within the description of a non-commercial use license, you may use the Software in the manner described in Parts III and IV below under "Scope of Grant."

        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.
    • Er... DRDOS 7.03 does not have native FAT32 support. I know there is a driver to provide it (tho it is not in the downloadable DRDOS 7.03 package), but that's just not the same as having native support.

      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...

  • Am I the only one who, to his shame, misread the title as "Free Denial Of Service" initally?

    Oops :)
  • I failed to do this in my teens, let's see if some
    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)

    by innocent_white_lamb ( 151825 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @03:15AM (#3017112)
    So many motherboard bios update utilities require that you boot DOS to run 'em. It would be grand if the bios folks would start making bootable update disks available, with FreeDOS all ready to go so we don't have to try to find a dusty old copy of DOS 5.0 or 3.2 to update the bios on a shiny new P4 motherboard.
  • Hey, if freeDOS can be released under the GNU, then why can't more free pr0n? I say that we get Katz, and actually put his ability to make up facts and inflate normally short articles to use. He could write letters to pr0n providers to get them to provide free pr0n to /.! Who's with me???

  • Freedom to choose? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by brenfern ( 260941 )

    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!

  • I wonder if it will work with SLE? Now you don't have to pirate DOS and you can be _somewhat_ legel in your illegal hobby (for those in the US anyway)
  • Fuck vi! To hell with emacs!

    Go edlin!

  • If you're interested in developing an OS, or are already partly on the way, the FreeDOS source is a very good place to look. Check out the source code to all of the DOS commands, see how Int 21h is handled, and so on.. lots of useful stuff in here to learn from.
  • There's at least one memory checker out there that works by creating a FreeDOS bootdisk and loading itself from there.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I installed it on vmware, and it works great !!
    but i cant run seal. Any basic vga driver ?

    And the best thing, we have tab completion, vim, etc.
  • I used to play with DOSEMU alot a while back. While I appreciate the work that FreeDOS has done, I always ended up dragging up the old floppies and using MS-DOS for my DOSEMU images because FreeDOS didn't support lredir. Without lredir, getting files to and from the DOSEMU enviroment was a bit of a hassle.

    What's the reason that lredir can't work with FreeDOS, and is it being addressed?
    • I'm not sure about lredir, but it is possible to run FreeDOS under Dosemu directly within the linux file system now. Works like a charm, and makes it extremely easy to use files in both systems.
  • I've been using FreeDOS recently to run old DOS door games on a Linux bbs, and it works almost perfectly (with the "press F5/F8 to skip/step through autoexec & config.sys" disabled, of course). Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a version of Dosemu working with virtual com ports, but the door games mostly work fine in local mode.

    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?
  • I was recently searching for alternatives to purchasing new thin clients at work, when I ran across the FreeDOS project.

    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.)

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