After a long 12-year journey, FreeDOS has achieved Version 1.0.
"FreeDOS 1.0 is a major milestone that has finally been released," writes Blair Campell, aka blairdude, on the FreeDOS Project Web site. "By now, we have a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement."
He reports that FreeDOS (which, as the name suggests, is gratis) now delivers long filename support in several of its apps, including COMMAND.COM. The kernel supports FAT32 and most applications. Additionally, he writes that HIMEM and EMM386 are "extremely stable considering the complexity."
There's also a new installer with user-friendly menus and a free-disk space checker.
FreeDOS has a following among admins at organizations running older software and diagnostic tools. Some end-users use it for running old DOS games, too, a la Doom.
Here's a take from Test Center Senior Contributing Editor Brian Chee, author of the Geeks in Paradise blog:
"FreeDOS is an interesting beast in that it answers issues for quite a few folks in the embedded systems world and other specialty vertical markets. A good example is the EnCase Network Boot Disk that was created by their users group to support easy acquisition of 'suspect' computer hard drives.Previously you had to 'obtain' a bootable disk, and then add the pieces necessary to do the job. Now with FreeDOS, you can package it all into a single ISO image.
FreeDOS should make it much easier for integrators to create bootable media that should be able to run on just about anything, with a much smaller learning curve than stripping down a Linux distro.
Basically, to create a bootable anything in the past you either had to purchase a license for MS-DOS, pirate a copy, or work on cutting down a Linux image."
(For those who don't know, Brian is also the director of the Univ. of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology's Advanced Network Computing Lab.)
So, now that FreeDOS is stable, can we next expect an open source version of Windows to run on top of it? And will it take another 12 years to get?
Wikipedia has ample information about FreeDOS. Version 1.0 is downloadable here. Customers also may order it on a CD.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 7, 2006 01:32 PM
