FreeDOS Turns 15 Years Old Today 124
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the keeps-on-ticking dept.
from the keeps-on-ticking dept.
Jim Hall writes "The FreeDOS Project turns 15 years old today! PD-DOS (later, 'FreeDOS') was announced to the world on June 28 1994 as a free replacement for MS-DOS, which Microsoft had announced would go away the following year, with the next release of Windows. There's more history available at the FreeDOS 'About' page and my blog. Today, FreeDOS is used by people all around the world. You can find FreeDOS in many different places: emulators, playing old DOS games, business, ... even bundled with laptops and netbooks. FreeDOS is still under active development, and recently released a new version of its kernel. A 'FreeDOS 1.1' distribution is planned."
Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was (Score:4, Informative)
My main use for FreeDOS is BIOS-updates for mainboards. Works beautifully.
Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, there's a 4. - putting older computers (especially [my emphasis!] pre-80386 PCs) to good use.
It sounds nice, and it's a noble sentiment. However, isn't there a point where running computers older than a certain age simply to get something out of them is counter-productive?
I mean, my 1998 Pentium-233 system is now (and has been for at least 2-3 years) so old that even many apps designed for "old" PCs won't run on it. A pre-80386 machine (i.e. 286 or older) will at best be approaching 20 years old, if not older! That's ancient.
I doubt such machines would even have PCI in them. Would they (for example, if you were using it as a router) include Ethernet hardware that wasn't a bottleneck on a modern 10/100 or 10/1000 network?
You might argue that getting even a little out of an old machine is better than it doing nothing, but how much electrical power will it require to keep running? Probably more than a small, inobtrusive modern device with the same functionality. Probably more than a six or seven year old laptop that you could get for little anyway.
And that's the thing; you could probably get a six or seven year old computer for next to nothing (I bet many people are throwing working ones out) even if you don't already have one. Ancient, but still massively faster than a 286, 386 or even 486!
Cut a long story short, if someone enjoys doing such stuff with a 286 for the sake of it, then fair enough. I just wouldn't say that it's really that much of a practical and/or environmentally-conscious choice.
Re:FreeDOS vs DOSBox? (Score:3, Informative)
As others have mentioned DOSBox is a DOS API emulator, not a complete Operating System as FreeDOS. For unknown reasons many hardware vendors and OEMs still rely on DOS boot disks to flash firmware on RAID controllers, BIOS, and Fiber Channel or iSCSI Host Bus Adapters. I could speculate that it has something to do with modern Operating Systems having greater or more complex abstraction between the hardware and the software. Either that, or there is just no reason to re-invent a wheel, when the wheel you have works just fine on DOS.
So while FreeDOS is not something that many people use everyday, it is something that many people heavily rely on to create bootable images for floppy disks or PXE-booting. Unlike other DOS implementations (DRDOS/PCDOS/MSDOS) there are not licensing costs associated with redistributing a bootable floppy image generated from FreeDOS. So FreeDOS allows hardware, software, and OEM vendors to pre-generate images of bootable floppy based utilities, and redistribute the images without fear of making a copyright violation.
I personally have dozens of floppy images built on FreeDOS, that I use to PXE-boot things like Ghost, SpinRite, BIOS and flash utilities, etc. Some of those images were pre-generated by vendors, some of them were generated by myself using the FreeDOS 'sysx' command on Linux or Windows. I would not be surprised if people are still using FreeDOS for these same things in another 15 years from now.
Re:Bios Upgrades (Score:5, Informative)
The one requirement I have for DOS is to do bios upgrades to older laptops which still requiring booting to dos. This seems to be one use case which I didn't have much luck with FreeDOS. Is that intentional part of the design (perhaps freedos protects the bios?) or was it just an incompatibility of the bios upgrade tool I have?
At a guess, I'd put this on the BIOS upgrade tool you have. Lots of BIOS updaters run fine on FreeDOS, and in fact several vendors such as ASUS [used to?] include a bootable copy of FreeDOS with their BIOS software if you got it on CDROM. The intention was to use this bootable CDROM to install the BIOS update from DOS.
I know that ASUS did this - at least as late as 2004 - because we wrote a technote [freedos.org] on how the ASUS CDROM that came with your motherboard was borked. Specifically, it looks like they didn't bother to completely remove the "installer" parts, which made it easy to break your Windows system by [accidentally] installing FreeDOS on it.
-jh
Re:FreeDos and hacking (Score:4, Informative)
FreeDos is a great way to root a windows machine almost instantly. Anyone can download it, install it into a user accessible directory and gain access to ALL local files simply because it mounts the existing file system.
Well, no. The FreeDOS kernel doesn't have NTFS support built-in, so it does nothing with Windows partitions formatted with NTFS. To read those, you need to use a TSR like NTFSDOS [wikipedia.org].
If your Windows partition used some version of FAT, then FreeDOS would read that, no problem. But so would any other OS, including Linux, or another version of Windows.
-jh
Re:In case anyone is puzzled as I was (Score:1, Informative)
I can't speak for others, but personally my main use for freedos is hardware hacking. Running motor controllers, data collection, and interfacing with other random bits of homemade electronic gadgetry... this is one time that I just want to be able to say "put 5 volts on pin x of the parallel port, read back from pin y" without having fight my way past a heavy-weight OS, rely on a bunch of not-quite compatible APIs, and generally deal with a host of potential points of failure. And while Freedos might not be great for most things when it comes to being a simple, reliable, bare-bones OS that doesn't get in the way it is without peer.