February 4, 2020

FreeDOS

The FreeDOS project began in June of 1994 (after Microsoft announced that it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS). FreeDOS 1.0 was released in 2006.

I suppose there are two kinds of people who might be interested in FreeDOS. One is the person like me who has some "one of a kind" irreplaceable applications that will only run under DOS. The other would be someone who has some odd fascination with ancient technology (granted though that FreeDOS shines it up nicely in many ways).

I started working with FreeDOS in 2010. I use FreeDOS to support an old PROM burner and some microcontroller development tools that I still find useful. I works wonderfully for me to get things done with those, better than MSDOS ever did.

• FreeDOS home page
• disk partitions
• CDROM support
• Booting the live CD

• FreeDOS Networking
• mTCP - networking tools for DOS
• Installing an old ssh version on my server
• FreeDOS and SAMBA mounts

• My install of FreeDOS 0.9 (2004)
• Another install of FreeDOS 0.9 (2010)
• Good install of FreeDOS 1.0 (2010)
• Bad install of FreeDOS 1.0 (2007)
• Some MSDOS notes

One thing FreeDOS could definitely use is more and better documentation. Apart from the fact that, years ago, I joyfully threw away every DOS manual I owned, I have also forgotten all of the weird tricks and tricky bits of working with DOS. FreeDOS indeed smooths this out, but it is still DOS, and this knowledge still applies. People may want to use FreeDOS who never used DOS, and for them documentation that assumes no prior knowledge would be essential.

On doing the install I find that the packet drivers are part of the install (wonderful!), but a hardware compatibility list would sure be nice. The current FAQ seems to be the best resource.

Questions: