Submitted by GNU/DOS 2006 SR1 was released today. It features various minor updates and bug fixes. Also, due to popular demand, the installation CD is now bootable. Download it here. GNU/DOS is a distribution of FreeDOS with various packages included, such as the OpenGEM GUI, a webbrowser and email client, the VIM editor, and much more.
What’s next, Open CP/M? Open RSTS/E?
CP/M was opensourced a while back, but nobody’s done anything with it. Open RSTS/E would be cool, but as far as I know, nobody’s even though of that.
That said, this looks to be a nice distro fo FreeDOS. I do wish they had used OpenWatcom (which can produce native DOS code and code for the standard extenders) rather than DJGPP which needs it’s own special extender.
However, DOS is still the fastest home PC operating system around.
This is a good spot to mention that my first PC, a Tandy 1000 running MSDOS 2.11 at 4.88 MHz, could do something faster than any PC of today running any Windows or Linux GUI.
It could repaint a whole 80×25 character screen of text so fast that you could never see even a trace of activity. One femtosecond it was displaying one page, and the next it was displaying a totally new page. My eye never saw it in transition. That extreme stability is the one thing I miss from the pre-Windows days.
I always see the GUI screen update, even though the PC is a thousand to a million times faster (depending how you calculate it).
This is a good spot to mention that my first PC, a Tandy 1000 running MSDOS 2.11 at 4.88 MHz, could do something faster than any PC of today running any Windows or Linux GUI.
Actually, the Tandy 1000’s 8088 ran at 4.77Mhz, just like IBM’s PC and XT.
😉
-Mak
I have fond memories of my days in DOS.
There must be more free DOS applications that could be included in this… games especially. Considering how many ‘old’ machines are still out there, this could provide a resurgence for DOS if it included more utilities and applications!
For games in DOS, my favorite emulators are ZSNES (SuperNES) and NESticle (regular/old NES). I doubt any USB game controllers will work under DOS, though you usually can still get the old media/game port controllers to work without any problems.
They run wonderfully under FreeDOS, and the ROM images are nice and small – so they don’t take up all the rediculous disk space that most PC games do.
Yay for DOS!
I wonder how well your average title from those abandonware sites would work on something like freedos. would be interesting to see.
I doubt any USB game controllers will work under DOS
There are USB drivers for DOS. They should have been included in this distro imho.
But I admit it’s not very likely USB-Joysticks and the like have drivers available.
How come there are USB drivers for DOS but no 3rd party USB drivers for Windows 95? Microsoft doesn’t make them available for old versions of 95, AFAIK…
Sadly, I believe you’ve answered your own question: Microsoft.
They simply don’t want people to continue using Win95 – they don’t make money on it anymore.
DOS, on the other hand, is a system that was around for so long that outside developers created and continued the DOS system in forms like this GNUDOS and FreeDOS (I also remember PTSDOS, MultiuserDOS?, and some other DOS incarnations). Because there is an open community around it, individual developers have continued these projects out of their own time, resources, and love (I love DOS).
Yes, the device I’m using is a PSone controller to USB (the Kiky-X-series adapter) – I love being able to play games with a real game controller. I do believe that some new motherboards have the ability to use USB devices like hard-wired legacy devices. I know of USB thumb-drives being bootable disks – I can only assume that some BIOSes have the ability to use standard devices like they were native (given that they are compatible enough). However, it is unlikely that the computers we want to run DOS on (usually older ones) have this built-in.
Here’s a good starting point for those looking for FreeDOS apps
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/links/
And old VBDOS here… ..last time I checked – it still worked under FreeDos.
http://www.bbs.motion-bg.com/index.php?file=489
I was writing my first longer thesis /cca 50 pages/ on my friend’s IBM XT – maybe it had a whopping 8 MHZ?
The word processing software we used was WordPerfect 5.1 – and on that slow machine it was extremely fast: search and replace took less than 1 second on a complex master- and subdocument, with pictures, equations, etc.
Indeed, it was significantly faster than is now my Word on a 3GHz P4.
Well designed applications, carefully chosen algorithms may be much important than the raw power.
Yeessss….
But naaaahnananaaaahnah.. My XT was running at 10 MHz, with 640 KB ram and had two 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy drives… take that
Yeah, and an IBM (actually Epson) 9-pin printer cabable of “sort of” color printing
WP5.1 was great. Liked it a lot. And for that matter, I could live with it still, if not other persons wanted more “functionality” in their documents and office apps.
In regard to speed a comparison between WP6.0a (or b), WP7, WP8 and Word 95/97/2000/XP/2003 and OO.o 1.x and 2.x is quite interesting.
An open source equivalent to WP8 in regard to resource usage, speed and functionality would be nice.
BTW: FreeDOS can play Warlords I
exactly, I couldn’t have said it better.
One can buy PII400, 128MB RAM, 4.3GB HDD and the rest of stuff for less than 40 euro. It can run Win2k at a reasonable speed for basic tasks (I even used Win2k on P150/32MB RAM). It can even handle SuSE 10.0+KDE at a reasonable speed.
My question is what’s the use for DOS now ?
Edited 2006-05-09 20:56
I’ve tried using Windows2000 on a Pentium MMX 200 MHz with 80 MB ram.
It’s not even close to usable on such a machine. It takes several seconds to show a popup menu, several seconds to just draw it. Starting IE6 takes approx. 5 minutes and using GTK-applications (like Firefox and Thunderbird) is virtually impossible, unless you don’t mind waiting 15 or 20 minutes before they have finished loading.
I’ve tried using Windows2000 on a Pentium MMX 200 MHz with 80 MB ram.
It’s not even close to usable on such a machine. It takes several seconds to show a popup menu, several seconds to just draw it. Starting IE6 takes approx. 5 minutes and using GTK-applications (like Firefox and Thunderbird) is virtually impossible, unless you don’t mind waiting 15 or 20 minutes before they have finished loading.
There is definitely something wrong with your setup or your hardware. I have used a Pentium MMX that I believe was only 166MHZ with 64MB or RAM and Windows 2000 ran pretty well on it. In fact Photoshop 6 was used on it on a daily basis.
It’s much more likely that we have a different definition on “pretty well”.
“Pretty well” is constantly being redefined, as computers get more powerful. I’m sure that I’d consider the performance of a clean Win95-installation to run unacceptable slow on a 200 MHz Pentium MMX. Even with more than 64 MB of RAM.
Did you use firewall and antivirus on said machine and how many years ago did you do it? I did it less than four months ago, so the experience is still very fresh in mind.
Did you use firewall and antivirus on said machine and how many years ago did you do it? I did it less than four months ago, so the experience is still very fresh in mind.
I used it about a year ago. There was no firewall or antivirus on the computer because it was not used on the internet. To be perfectly honest I was surprised as hell that it ran as well as it did.
* Legacy applications or old, but still reliable (or even unreplaceable) custom-made solutions requirering DOS
* Low memory footprint, RealTime like (= one task at a time) embedded computing / data acquisition (or more general : It’s easy to write basic I/O related software under DOS, since the operating system tends to stay out of the way of the programmer, your I/O hardware needs to be supported though. But you would be surprised how many vendors for industrial / data acquisition special hardware offer DOS drivers / userland programs, at least this has been the case in 2004 when I stopped working in this area)
* Easy to use and hard to destroy play-around platform for childrens first Computers
* Have Fun with your old Dos Games (although DosEmu does a pretty good job at helping me to waste time playing Dune2, Ulitma Underworld or Master of Orion 🙂 )
* Nostalgy
* Learning the internals of DOS is possible since FreeDOS is OpenSource, so this has definitly educational value
* Resurect old Hardware, that has problems suporting modern Linux/BSD variants (DOS runs on pretty much every PC/XT, that offers at least some KByte of RAM)
* …
For all this needs, FreeDos / GNU/DOS can be a possible answer, albeit it is perhaps not the only answer. Still, it is good to have it around !
Regards
EDIT : Yes, I know, that DosEmu uses a FreeDOS binary. I was refering to DOS distributions in general in my comment, just to clear things up
Edited 2006-05-09 21:28
“I have fond memories of my days in DOS.”
Yeah, i “fondly” remember endlessly screwing with ISA card irq’s, dma’s and memory addresses, creating 5 gazillion different boot configurations with different memory manager configurations and not being able to run more than one program at a time (not counting TSR’s). Yes, I sure miss those days….
Not much different than the problems we have had with Windows and still have. The only difference is that back then we could the problems
Someone recently dropped 16 small footprint boxes on my doorstep. Pentium 200mhz 32mb of ram sodimm (I have found 2 32mb to up one to 64mb) NE2000 compatable nic. It runs 98 extremely nice on 32mb ram but I want to put something new on. BEos is a personal fav but the video cardisnt supported and it runs really really slow. I’m gonna find a pci vga card for one and run beos and I’ve already downloaded this dos distro and I’ll do a comparison. If anybody’s interested with the results email me ben at buckys.tv