FreeDOS is 30 years old! What about the prospects?
In 1994 appeared an alternative to MS-DOS, which was named FreeDOS. This is a free operating system with a text interface, which is known to millions of PC users. The OS is not only not outdated, but also continues to develop – primarily due to enthusiasts.
What kind of system is this?
The first version of the future operating system appeared in 1994, its author is Jim Hall. Initially, the OS was called PD-DOS (Public Domain DOS). Hall developed his project because Microsoft announced that it was switching its attention to the next-generation operating system – Windows 95. Many PC users took this news negatively and were not ready for graphics, remaining committed to the pure command line.
PD-DOS quickly developed both a kernel and a command line interpreter COMMAND.COM with basic utilities. They became the basis of the operating system. The official release of the initial version of FreeDOS under the GPL license took place on January 12, 1998.
The navigator and captain of the ship called FreeDOS is still Hall. He claims that the level of interest in this operating system remains about the same. And the community of developers is not shrinking.
“Judging from the emails people send me with questions, or new people asking questions on our freedos-user or freedos-devel mailing lists, or people talking about FreeDOS on Facebook and other forums, I'd say there are about that many people involved in the FreeDOS community in some way.”says Hall.
What's going on with FreeDOS now?
The OS is still in service. The current version FreeDOS 1.3 was introduced in 2022. It is currently used in areas such as pre-installing a minimal environment on new computers, running old games, teaching students the basics of building operating systems, creating CD/Flash for installing firmware and configuring the motherboard. It is also used in emulators (e.g. DOSEmu) and on embedded equipment (e.g. POS terminals).
Possibilities FreeDOS:
support for FAT32 and long file names;
the ability to run network applications;
disk cache implementation;
support for HIMEM, EMM386 and UMBPCI memory management systems. JEMM386 memory manager;
print system support;
drivers for CD-ROM, mouse;
support for ACPI, temporary sleep and power saving mode;
The kit includes a media player MPXPLAY with support for mp3, ogg and wmv;
XDMA and XDVD – UDMA drivers for hard drives and DVD drives;
CUTEMOUSE mouse driver;
utilities for working with archives 7Zip, INFO-ZIP zip and unzip;
multi-window text editors EDIT and SETEDIT, file viewer PG;
FreeCOM is a command shell with file name completion support;
network support, Links and Dillo web browsers, BitTorrent client;
the presence of a package manager and support for installing various parts of the OS in the form of packages;
a set of programs ported from Linux (DJGPP);
a set of high-performance mtcp network applications;
support for USB controllers and the ability to work with USB Flash.
What's next?
The next major update will take at least a couple of years to arrive: they come out every 4-6 years. Why so slowly? There are several reasons. The community works on a voluntary basis, and the community of this OS is still smaller than that of Linux. In addition, it takes considerable effort to overcome the technological gap between the system code from the 90s and modern equipment.
In addition to the hardware, another important and complex issue is the transition from BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) to UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). Almost all manufacturers have already switched to UEFI. In addition, more and more new architectures are appearing, which FreeDOS was simply not designed to support. For example, ARM and others are not compatible with x86 architectures.
The creator of FreeDOS says that this OS is not really needed on new PCs and laptops. It is best to run it on a virtual machine with BIOS emulation. But there are enthusiasts who run the old OS on new devices. As for old hardware, FreeDOS is ideal for it.
Another advantage of FreeDOS is that it allows you to run old classic games like Nukem, Commander Keen, Biomenace, Wolfenstein 3D. Of course, this applies not only to games, but also to DOS applications that were relevant several decades ago.
In version 1.3 appeared several modern features. Among them:
FAT32 file system support: to maintain backward compatibility with MS-DOS, the kernel remains 16-bit;
zip and unzip utilities: included in the basic composition of “pure” DOS;
data compression in the floppy disk assembly: allows to reduce the number of required floppy disks by half;
network stack support;
FreeCOM command shell (COMMAND.COM variant): updated to version 0.85a;
support for new programs and games, updated versions of third-party utilities;
the installation process has been modernized;
Improved CD drive initialization and implemented CD builds for booting in Live mode;
Added support for automatic configuration of information for COUNTRY.SYS;
The Help program has been switched to using AMB (html ebook reader) to display help.
Now there is a ready test version 1.4 with several interesting updates. Most of them contain fixes – for example, a new fdisk, which provides a workaround for the BIOS Book8088 error, and a new archiver Zoo, which has a fix for clusters larger than 32 KB, the edlin editor has been updated. By the way, one of the possible innovations is Windows support, which was not there before.
Well, all that remains is to wish the project long life and successful development in the modern world.
