GNU/DOS version 2005 was released today. GNU/DOS is a FreeDOS distribution for desktops which includes some FreeDOS utilities, much of the DJGPP suite including many GNU utilities, vim, Arachne, and OpenGEM. All code used in GNU/DOS is open-source or public domain with source. ISO images are currently available, and there are plans to produce commercial CDs very soon. Installation is currently difficult due to the lack of an open-source CD-ROM driver. For more information, go here.
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The answer he gives:
WHY DID YOU DO THIS?
Because, frankly, I didn't like the direction the Linux kernel was going in (unstable kernels only, getting too big and bloated, etc). I didn't want to investigate BSD. I thought, "What if I could combine the simplicity of FreeDOS with the high-quality GNU utilities of DJGPP in a distribution to compete with Linux?"
Thus, GNU/DOS was born.
Now.. the "why" question again? WHY?????????????
The first thing that tipped me off that this was going to be a worthless click was the link to the "The Bush Knew Web Page??" at the top...
GNU/DOS is another distribution of FreeDOS. There are three others: official distribution, NanoDOS and a LiveCD
If you don't know, in the previous months I contributed to FreeDOS Beta 9 the italian translation...
FreeDOS is a good project, so contribute 
Ok, so the guy's reasons for making this don't seem adequare enough for me, but its still cool.
I wanted to see FreeDOS go somewhere for a while, it should still be a fun OS to play with, and hopefully now it will get some extra attention and some renewed livelyhood.
Seal is dead, which is unfortunate; but it should still be possible for anyone interested to revive the project. Personally though I would much rather see the x server ported or a proper graphical system implemented. Allegro doesn't have much hardware support in DOS.
Anyway I'll go check out the side now, I should probably have read the article before posting.
Anyone looking for a working download link for the lite version should try this:
http://danq.lunarpages.com/files/gnudos05l.iso
Failing that simply go to the parent folder ( http://danq.lunarpages.com/files/ ) and find the file you want.
@Celerate
Look at this: http://cubegui.sourceforge.net
Seems a new gui (similiar to SEAL) for DOS/FreeDOS
Anonymous (IP: ---.26-151.libero.it) is tails92
I forgot to insert the name
Check out the date of the last release of CubeOS... 8/7/2002.
Do any of these DOSes have drivers for USB mice and modern soundcards yet?
With the FreeDOS-32 kernel something like this could be a lot more interesting. Especially with X.org ported.
You know... they are beginning to build up moment in early adopters who may or may not fulfil specific niche requirements by using them but there are a lot of things to consider like too:
- Will they produce the strange warning message that DrDOS produced when starting Windows 3.1?
- Will Wordperfect Corporation/Novell/Corell/Whoever port Wordperfect to FreeDOS / GNU DOS?
- How about hardware support? Will a consumer be able to simple plug-and-play with their rebadged taiwanese $2 USB-almost-compatible webcam?
- Beware: the TCO of FreeDOS / GNU DOS is so high because of the painful transition process from MS DOS, and the need to find highly qualified staff with the skills needed in order to properly handle the relative complexity of FreeDOS / GNU DOS.
- Last, but not least: the legal uncertainties. The SCO Group claims to own the copyrights, patents and trade secrets related to ideas and methods in COMMAND.COM. If you decide to build up your critical infrastructure on FreeDOS / GNU DOS, prepare to be sued...
A 'distro' for FreeDOS? In and of itself, the concept is nice, but at this moment it's nothing more than an install of FreeDOS together with Arachne, DJGPP and the GEM interface preinstalled. Things that are easy enough to download and install if you can work with DOS at all.
Then again, I guess it's 'news'
@Adam W: check this site:
http://www.stefan2000.com/darkehorse/PC/DOS/Drivers/USB/
The broken link has been fixed. The upper-case ".ISO" extension had to be changed to a lower-case ".iso" extension, thought I fixed it when I uploaded it, guess not. The "lite" image is downloadable now.
SCO doesn't own the FreeDOS project's COMMAND.COM, it's GPL software.
Ha, ha!
Nor it is a MS-DOS "derivative", no matter what AdTI people might say 
I was only trying to be funny, and to highlight the high level of Linux-related FUD lately in the environment... I intended to use FreeDOS / GNU DOS as an excuse, not as a victim
So, if it's not clear yet: It was all a JOKE!
The reason why DOS is mostly dead these days is that Microsoft focussed alot more on Windows when Windows 95 came out. Why? Because people were complaining that console mode was so '80.
But never forget the great success of DOS. Game programmers sometimes think of DOS as the "good old days". DOS was an amazing thing after all. It was the best damn OS to start programming as well. Writing assembly code on DOS was a wonderfull. Even these days, new assembly programmers go back to DOS to learn the real concept behind a non-protected environmement. MASM > *, btw ;-)
I think it would be awesome to see DOS again but with added multi-tasking support. Even one could make a great GUI for DOS...that would be so...awesome. Keep working guys!
IP: ---.72-203-24.mc.videotron.ca wrote:
>But never forget the great success of DOS. Game >programmers sometimes think of DOS as the "good old >days". DOS was an amazing thing after all. It was the >best damn OS to start programming as well. Writing >assembly code on DOS was a wonderfull. Even these days, >new assembly programmers go back to DOS to learn the real >concept behind a non-protected environmement. MASM > *, >btw ;-)
You forget the Amiga
DOS games are almost all shareware and mostly junk
Amiga had better games than DOS
On Amiga sounds were REAL not beepy like DOS
In 1985 this was the situation:
---------------------------------
The amiga had 4096 colors (palette 320) , the dos had 256 colors (palette 16)
DOS had beepy sounds , Amiga instead had real sounds
---------------------------------
Then what is the better? AMIGA!
I'm not an Amiga expert. I know only a little about it (like most people). But DOS was still the best to me
Having coded a using x86 ASM on DOS back in the early-mid 90's, I can tell you it was fun, but I coded "a little" 68k ASM on the Amiga before I went PC, and the Amiga blew the PC away in every possible way.
Borland TASM was the best PC assembler btw. MASM sucked.
Does DOSBox use FreeDOS? If so, that would be reason enough to continue its development - that is, the ability to run old DOS stuff (those wonderful games from back then) without the hassle of having a real DOS system!
I don't know about DOSBox but DosEmu uses FreeDOS.
well, tasm is nice too. i like both of em. at least they dont use the damn at&t format adopted by the gnu =)
Maybe you don't like at&t format but this doesn't mean GNU is crap.
And you can also use NASM in combination with GCC
Tasm & MASM = two bad assemblers
How I can compile old ASM progs written with one of these assemblers without buying them? (and them aren't longer sold...)
I think NASM is better
1. Legacy application support.
* Run under a hardware emulator.
2. Firmware upgrades.
* Less of an issue over time as most firmware updates now require (unfortunately) Windows. (Is ReactOS robust enough to do this?)
I've never heard it called coral cache, I'm quite sure it's just coral.
http://www.coralcdn.org/ :
"Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.
Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects' URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. These volunteer sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once. "
Anyone have an MD5SUM from a working ISO, the ISO I have won't boot in Qemu and I'd like to make sure it at least survived the download.
Thank you! I have added Coral links as the main links on the page. Hopefully this will save me bandwidth. I also applied to SourceForge last night and hopefully they will approve me.
was its simple boot structure, 2 files was all you needed to keep watch over.
now if someone could throw together a dos like enviroment with memory protection and the ability to kill a program or driver loaded into t&r mode without having to reboot things would be interesting 
oh wait, thats gobolinux
Coral has a 50 MB limit and won't work with my 76 MB lite ISO or my 217 MB full ISO 
How did FreeDOS become GNU DOS?
Are we to see a GNU Firefox, GNU OpenOffice then too?
What exactly is the criteria that allows someone to rename it GNU?
Because it contains most of the GNU utilities (in DJGPP).
Because it contains most of the GNU utilities (in DJGPP), in combination with the FreeDOS kernel. Just like GNU/Linux or GNU/HURD.
GNU/Windows user packages up GNU/Utilities for use in conjunction with the FreeDOS kernel, citing GNU/Linux as being too bloated. The lead developer Daniel Quintaliani was not quoted as saying, "GNU/Linux is too functional, supports too much hardware, sports modern filesystems and protected memory. This instability is contrary to GNU/DOS's philosophy of getting this GNU/Windows user's website posted on OSNews."
GNU/DOS supports FAT16 and FAT32; I'd say FAT32 is "modern" (although NTFS is usually installed by default on XP machines, people (like me) tend to go back to FAT32 because of its slowness, easy fragmentation, and restrictions with regards to installing other operating systems)
The reason I did this was because even though Linux has greater hardware support, I feel that since the 2.6 kernels Linux has been going in a very bad direction and feel that in certain situations, DOS is all that's necessary. Remember, DOS is faster than Linux, and if you're just using the Internet, checking e-mail, or playing a simple game, DOS is fine.
FAT32 is by no stretch of the imagination a modern filesystem.
DOS is "faster" at Linux than what? "Just using the Internet and checking e-mail" is sufficient in what languages? DOS is incredibly useful even today in embedded projects, but as a desktop operating system it's not even remotely in the league.
"because of its slowness, easy fragmentation, and restrictions with regards to installing other operating systems"
Because of NTFS' slowness...
Troll #234,687,324,345 from mc.videotron.ca
anyway, like the gnu/dos author said, linux is slow. it takes 30 seconds to load on a nice laptop...duh...windows xp loads twice faster. dont get pissed but...the linux kernel is like junk foods.
>
>
I like the fact that Linux is "Slow-Loading" since it's basically telling you if there's anything wrong with your hardware.
How many Windows and Mac wankers like you are running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what's wrong with with their machines because all they get is pretty graphics as the system boots.
ever heard of boot logs? events logs? windows can dump alot of debugging info if you need them. and btw, booting in safe mode is plain text (or theres a key you can press to turn off graphical boot)
trust me, it's really easy to figure out what's going wrong with the hardware. my network card stopped working once (i think it died because of the input connector), when it tried to boot in normal mode it failed (the network card failed to start) so it switched itself to safe mode and then i was able to figure out the problem in about 10secs...
I have Linux and Windows XP, and I've seen Mac OS X 10.3 boot on an Laptop purchased not long before the release of 10.4 and I've compared the start up speeds. They all take almost the same amount of time, there is no different so drastic that you could say OS A boots in half the time of OS B.
Anyway bootup speed isn't the only thing that's important in an operating system, I wish people would stop making such shallow comments about any operating system they happen to dislike just to spite its users.
BSD 's more faster than Linux
On my laptop Linux boots approx. in 1 minute and 50 seconds with KDE, X11 and all the services (my MEPIS Linux does this! )
On FreeBSD it boot approx. in 35 seconds , I login, I do
Why on FreeBSD , KDE is not bloat but a really good fast desktop (KDE 3.3)?
FreeBSD is one of the fastest operating systems I came in contact with. It rocks!
My laptop is a Pentium M 1400Mhz...
@Celerate
I just done a comparison...
I don't like so much Mac OS X but I like Darwin
Altough Mac OS X seems cool...
About Windows, microsoft always make bad comments on we users of Linux or MAC or *BSD or anything else, so is reasonable the fact that we want a Windows-free world.
yeah thats what i said, bsd > linux. these bsd kernels are really well optimized. the same thing happened to me until i dropped linux completely. i just don't get why it's so slow. i even tried debian sarge on my amd 3200+ with a gig of ram (base install+x+kde and base install+x+gnome) and it was running way slower than the same thing on my laptop (mobile 2500+ with only 512megs of ram, the hd is much slower too...)
i meant..the same thing on my laptop except running freebsd instead of linux.
First thing: tails92 not tails96...
Linux is slow. The kernel has much stupid hacks... and I don't like the developing line of 2.6
If it not was for the softmodem in my laptop (driver Slamr by Smartlink Ltd.) I dropped linux completely.
I use linux only to connect to the internet.
I like so much how *BSD is... the developers are normal people often more experienced than the paid Linux developers
So if you want a system that responds to your commands you want: FreeBSD!
I've read somewhere that WordPerfect for DOS was programmed in Assembler in those good old days.
So i will try to give you all an educated guess (AFAIK):
It won't happen... (at least by any of the mentioned Corp).
The best guess would be to have someone dissassemble one of the old progs and change the system calls and compile it again... (my guess again is that would be faster to build a new word processor like WordPerfect from scratch).
@Kindaiano
No, please don't do disassamble as it is illegal with commercial programs
You may want to use a GPL clone of WordPerfect (and more!) called e3. There is also an e3 version for DOS. e3 is written enterily in NASM assembly, and is my preferite text editor! But also it has feature-less C version...
look for e3... is very good...
I'm pretty sure that if it's an advanced text-editor you want, there's plenty for dos around by now, even FreeDOS-compatible. (Isn't FreeDOS supposed to be 98% compatible anyway?)
About boot-times: if you're running a desktop Linux distro, untweaked, on a PIII-500 with 512 MB...you're gonna notice how slow it boots up. For people like me without the latest and greated and who don't like humming in their room 24/7, and who like to browse before going to the univ, it matters.
Boot-time comparison:
1 FreeDOS by a mile
2 BeOS by a league
3 Windows XP
4 Windows 98
5 Linux behind by a stretch
And that's a pretty dissapointing performance for the effort of thousands of programmers, even if it's boot-sequence is inherently superior.
"Linux is slow. The kernel has much stupid hacks..."
In some cases you could be considered right, many distributions pick a pre-release kernel and use that in their distribution because they want to appear bleeding-edge, but not all of them.
Stable releases of the Linux kernel don't have "stupid hacks" enabled by default, if you compile the kernel youself you can enable them but good distributions don't. Judging Linux as a whole because of a few wreckless distributions isn't fair and isn't right.
Every OS has its flaws, lets not paint a black and white picture here.
@Egrugius
Here is the corrected statistic:
1 FreeDOS
2 AmigaOS
3 BeOS
4 FreeBSD
5 Windows 98
6 Linux and Windows XP
In booting , XP and Linux have the same speed!
Poor me... my name goes always away... !
the above post is by me!
Celerate wrote:
" In some cases you could be considered right, many distributions pick a pre-release kernel and use that in their distribution because they want to appear bleeding-edge, but not all of them.
Stable releases of the Linux kernel don't have "stupid hacks" enabled by default, if you compile the kernel youself you can enable them but good distributions don't. Judging Linux as a whole because of a few wreckless distributions isn't fair and isn't right.
Every OS has its flaws, lets not paint a black and white picture here.
"
And is right that *BSD must always be ignored in favor of Linux?
No, I think...
And what about the kernel not building because gcc says error? These are not hacks,eh? Go to freebsd.org (or netbsd.org or openbsd) these sites will show *BSD's power,
and instatly you will get bored of Linux and you will want to format its partition. Sure.
I agree with your list, my experiences with loading times are pretty much the same. also, e3 sounds good, so I think I will check it out, thanks!
I can't agree with your statistics, as far as Windows XP goes its faster than Win98 and Linux because it uses multi-threading and the other two don't; but I have used Windows 98 and Linux and the boot speed on Linux was faster, even if only by a little (using a Celeron 466 w/ 128 Mb of ram at the time).
In case you're also taking into account the time that it takes for KDE or Gnome to start, that isn't boot time for Linux itself since using something like Icewm, XFCE or BackBox can remove that delay. Also the nice thing about Linux is that you don't have to turn it off before going and turn it back on when you come back, its stable enough to run for a very long time without crashing. If you're worried about getting hacked, which could happen to any OS, just run "/etc/init.d/internet stop" if you're goin to leave it for a while and then run "/etc/init.d/internet start" when you get back. If you choose well supported hardware you can also have it hybernate or go into standby while you're away, the power consumption will be negligible and with a simple press of the power you can be back at the login screen in less than half a minute.
Sure Windows XP can do all of that too, but the point is that boot time isn't as important as so many people imply.
Celerate wrote:
"Also the nice thing about Linux is that you don't have to turn it off before going and turn it back on when you come back, its stable enough to run for a very long time without crashing."
Have you heard of LSE/OS?
Celerate wrote:
"If you're worried about getting hacked, which could happen to any OS, just run "/etc/init.d/internet stop" if you're goin to leave it for a while and then run "/etc/init.d/internet start" when you get back."
But with OpenBSD hacking will appear more rarely even if you're connected with the Internet. I've heard of Linux boxs being rooted or infected by rootkits
And I think there is no reason to remain "power on" a box that is not a server for long time
If you've been watching the articles here, you might remember about a month ago there was one on speeding up the linux boot. The problem was that most distros start all system services in sequential order, even if they could be run concurrently. The article (someone find a link!) was on a project to start as many concurrently as possible. The preliminary results were getting Gentoo down from almost two minutes to under 40 seconds for a full boot to Gnome with all services.
I'm a bit tired of hearing people say "Linux is so stable, Windows is not!".
This is not true anymore. I got both Windows 2000 and XP running for 12 months (on my desktop machine that I use ~10 hours a day).
Ok, let me clarify this: I don't play games. Most people that have to restart Windows these days are big gamers. They use beta graphic card drivers and 10 millions tweaks. Windows cannot be blamed for that. Sure this doesn't happen under Linux: there are only a few linux gamers.
Some of you may be surprised by my uptimes. The first questions that might come to your mind are: you didn't install new softwares during 12 months? no windows updates?
Well, again this is a misconception. Most softwares don't need Windows to be restarted anymore. In the worst case (that happened only a few times), you have to stop a service and turn it back on. Well exactly like under Linux.
Oh...the Windows 2000 box rebooted itself during a power outage and I manually shutdown'ed the Windows XP box cause I had to move it...
Please note that both box still ran fine the second before rebooting. The size of their swap files was normal and the memory usage was normal as well...a year later.
I don't recall anyone here commenting on how stable those versions of Windows were until your post.
"Ok, let me clarify this: I don't play games. Most people that have to restart Windows these days are big gamers. They use beta graphic card drivers and 10 millions tweaks. Windows cannot be blamed for that. Sure this doesn't happen under Linux: there are only a few linux gamers. "
Its not limited to gamers, I've experienced problems with Windows XP that were enexplicable and I'm an every day ordinary user. After a perfectly clean installation of Windows XP my computer would lock up if at any point it were to be logged out after the first user and then logged back in, this includes when Windows automatically returns to the login screen after being left idle for too long. Similarly Windows XP would lock up if it was told to go into standby, this used to work fine before I had to reinstall it because of other unusual and crippling issues that had arrisen with the OS.
Different operating systems work for different people and their computers, that is why you can have a year of uptime with Windows and my computer will only give me 48 hours at most with it.
When you people are complaining about boot time which distro are you using? I've got a desktop system here (AMD 2200+, 512mb) and It boots gentoo about as fast as it boots WinXP. This is pretty much a standard gentoo system with a monolithic kernel (i.e. all drivers built in).
Now there is a heap of things you can do to speed this up such as running a paralell init script, and optimizing various parts.
Now there are going to be some people bitching about boot time when they are using a distro that autodetects hardware on boot, all I can say is that if you have a problem with it turn it off! and compile your own kernel with exactly the support you need. Hardware auto detect is for people who don't know about there hardware and don't want to know about there hardware.
I'm sick of the generic bashes against linux that only affect fedora or suse or some other distro. If you are comparing FreeBSD to linux compare it to something in the same category such as Gentoo or Slackware.
Yes linux isn't perfect, Yes Theo was right when he said that most linux distros aren't as consistant as the BSDs (Have a look at the man pages) but hey openBSD's SMP performace is lacking. They are the choices you make.
Look I really don't care I just wish people would stop bitching about why this desktop sucks and why this one is better, you run it you deal with it and if it works for you good, if it doesn't change it.
funny to find out somebody does not like linux and goes back to dos.
anyway, a nice project.
> @Celerate
> Look at this: http://cubegui.sourceforge.net
> Seems a new gui (similiar to SEAL) for DOS/FreeDOS
CubeGUI is old (from 2002).
Better using OzoneGUI http://ozonegui.net/
It is from 2004 and seems to be more mature.
But all projects like this (SEAL, QubeOS, CubeGUI, OzoneGUI) seams to be dead.
And at
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=328
you can read a old OSNews story about QubeOS.
To the history of all:
At first there was SEAL developed. After that the developer published it under GPL and developed on QubeOS. The SEAL community worked again on SEAL. CubeOS cumming up. And at the end there comes Ozoone
Damn! You all like to bitch!
Raise your hand if you were witness to the DOS > Win 3.11 > Win95 progression.
OK - Now raise your hand if all you ever knew was Windows 98, MacOS, and that Linux stuff.
If you used DOS, still might use DOS, or can recommend this software to *get someone off DOS*, then enjoy the fruits of that guy's labor with a smile.
If all you can think of is:
"Why?!"
"and he thought *Linux* was stupid"
"Not good enough for me"
Then you are missing the point ENTIRELY. Smile, nod, and go on.
Otherwise, download this stuff (or the components thereof), see what it was like to use GEM on DOS instead of Windows 3.1 on DOS (yes - there was an alternative) and develop a shred of appreciation for the world that existed before you came along.
Damn, I'm getting old.
> Raise your hand if you were witness to the DOS > Win 3.11 > Win95 progression.
Wow, you're really old! You must be at least...in your 20s?
> If you used DOS, still might use DOS, or can recommend this
> software to *get someone off DOS*, then enjoy the fruits of
> that guy's labor with a smile.
I used DOS and I'm not smiling. I wrote a lot of software for DOS. I used DOS for many years. This "project" is entirely disingenuous. Its motivation is braindead and the packager's understanding of what he's talking about is seriously broken. FreeDOS is actually a great project, but it's completely incomparable to linux outside of a limited set of embedded tasks, and for someone who basically just uses Windows XP to claim that DOS is a suitable alternative because he doesn't like the direction of the 2.6 tree borders on crazy.
I don't particularly care for the organizational and documentation quality of the Linux kernel, and it hardly reflects the design choices that I would make, and I definitely think there has been serious regression with respect to the concept of "stable" since the release of 2.4.x, but Daniel has made it perfectly clear to me that he hasn't the foggiest idea what he's going on about.
> Then you are missing the point ENTIRELY. Smile, nod, and go on.
The point is self-aggrandizement realized through contrarian behavior. I think you've missed it entirely.
