After five years of development, the stable version of FreeDOS 1.3 has been released, which advances the free alternative to DOS with a suite of GNU utilities. At the same time, a new release of the FDTUI 0.8 (FreeDOS Text User Interface) shell, implementing a user interface for FreeDOS, is available. FreeDOS code is distributed under the GPLv2 license, and the size of the bootable ISO image is 375 MB.
The FreeDOS project was founded in 1994 and can be applied in areas such as pre-installing a minimal environment on new computers, running old games, using on embedded devices (e.g., POS terminals), teaching students the basics of operating system construction, using in emulators (e.g., DOSEmu), creating CD/Flash for firmware installation and motherboard configuration.
Some features of FreeDOS:
- Support for FAT32 and long file names;
- Ability to run network applications;
- Implementation of a disk cache;
- Support for memory management systems HIMEM, EMM386, and UMBPCI. Memory manager JEMM386;
- Support for printing systems; drivers for CD-ROM, mouse;
- Support for ACPI, sleep mode, and power-saving mode;
- Included is the MPXPLAY media player supporting mp3, ogg, and wmv;
- XDMA and XDVD — UDMA drivers for hard drives and DVD devices;
- CUTEMOUSE mouse driver;
- Utilities for working with archives 7Zip, INFO-ZIP zip, and unzip;
- Multi-window text editors EDIT and SETEDIT, as well as file viewer PG;
- FreeCOM — command shell with support for filename autocompletion;
- Network support, web browsers Links and Dillo, BitTorrent client;
- Availability of a package manager and support for installing various OS components as packages;
- A set of ported programs from Linux (DJGPP).
- Set of high-performance network applications mtcp;
- Support for USB controllers and ability to work with USB Flash.
In the new version:
- The kernel has been updated to version 2043 with support for the FAT32 file system. To maintain backward compatibility with MS-DOS, the kernel remains 16-bit.
- The basic composition of 'clean' DOS includes the zip and unzip utilities.
- Data compression has been implemented in the floppy disk build, which reduced the number of required floppy disks by half.
- Network stack support has been restored.
- FreeCOM command shell (variant of COMMAND.COM) has been updated to version 0.85a.
- Support for new programs and games has been added, and versions of third-party utilities have been updated.
- The installation process has been modernized.
- Initialization of the CD drive has been improved, and CD builds for loading in Live mode have been implemented.
- Support for automatic configuration of information for COUNTRY.SYS has been added.
- The Help program has been updated to use AMB (html ebook reader) for displaying help.
Source: opennet.ru
