After five years of development, a stable version of the FreeDOS 1.3 operating system has been published, within which a free alternative to DOS with an environment from GNU utilities is being developed. At the same time, a new release of the FDTUI 0.8 (FreeDOS Text User Interface) shell is available, with an implementation of the user interface for FreeDOS. The FreeDOS code is distributed under the GPLv2 license, the size of the bootable iso image is 375 MB.
The FreeDOS project was founded in 1994 and in the current realities can be applied in such areas as pre-installing a minimal environment on new computers, running old games, using embedded equipment (for example, POS terminals), teaching students the basics of building operating systems, using emulators (for example, DOSEmu), creating a CD / Flash for installing firmware and configuring the motherboard.
Some features of FreeDOS:
- Support for FAT32 and long filenames;
- Ability to run network applications;
- Implementation of disk cache;
- 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 operation;
- Includes MPXPLAY media player 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 7Zip, INFO-ZIP zip and unzip archives;
- Multi-window text editors EDIT and SETEDIT, as well as a PG file viewer;
- FreeCOM - command shell with filename 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.
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 "pure" DOS includes utilities zip and unzip.
- The assembly for floppy disks uses data compression, which made it possible to halve the number of floppy disks required.
- Returned support for the network stack.
- The FreeCOM command shell (a variant of COMMAND.COM) has been updated to version 0.85a.
- Added 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 loading in Live mode.
- Added support for automatic configuration information for COUNTRY.SYS.
- The Help program has been converted to use AMB (html ebook reader) for help output.
Source: opennet.ru