FreeDOS is a complete, free, DOS-compatible operating system that you can use to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software, or develop embedded systems. Any program that works on MS-DOS should also run on FreeDOS.
It doesn’t cost anything to download and use FreeDOS. You can also share FreeDOS for others to enjoy! And you can view and edit our source code, because all FreeDOS programs are distributed under the GNU General Public License or a similar open source software license.
You can play your favorite DOS games on FreeDOS. And there are a lot of great classic games to play: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Commander Keen, Rise of the Triad, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem, and many others!
Need to recover data from an old business program? Or maybe you need to run a report from your old finance system? Just install your legacy software under FreeDOS, and you’ll be good to go!
Many embedded systems run on DOS, although modern systems may instead run on Linux. If you support an older embedded system, you might be running DOS. And FreeDOS can fit in very well.
Jim is attending the Kieler Open Source und Linux Tage in Kiel, Germany (15 + 16 September, 2017). He is giving a presentation about the history of the FreeDOS Project, and a little about where things are headed. In the afternoon, he will give a talk about usabilty testing in open source software. If you'd like a copy of the slides, you can find them on Jim's personal page. These presentations are available under the Creative Commons Attribution.
On June 29th, 2017, FreeDOS turned 23 years old. There’s nothing special about "23," but I thought it would be great to celebrate the anniversary by having a bunch of past and current users share their stories about why they use FreeDOS. So, I made a call for users to write their own FreeDOS stories. This eBook contains the voices of many of the users who contributed their stories, as well as the history of FreeDOS. Many individuals have helped make FreeDOS what it is, but this eBook represents only a few of them. I hope you enjoy this collection of 23 years of everything FreeDOS! 23 Years of FreeDOS (ebook)
WCD (Wherever Change Directory) is a command-line program to change directory fast. It saves time typing at the keyboard. Erwin has released wcd 6.0.1. This release fixes a bug in the DOS, OS/2, and Windows versions that was present since version 5.3.3. When a user typed drive and directory name (e.g. wcd d:games), wcd did not find the directory. Also: New Brazilian Portuguese translations have been added for the UI messages and the manual. You can find the new version at the WCD website. See also the full release notes.
While FreeDOS EDIT is our standard full-screen editor, the FreeDOS Edlin project is the standard line editor for the FreeDOS operating system. Gregory Pietsch announced: "It has only been six and a half years between releases, but a new version of Edlin, 2.16, is now on SourceForge! Among the new items are translations into Slovenian and Turkish and a test for process.h for those compilation environments (Borland, cough) that need it. It was back around 2013 that this was requested even though I was in no shape at the time to do it." You can find Edlin version 2.16 at FreeDOS Edlin on Sourceforge.
Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro has been working on a version of the UPTIME utility for FreeDOS. UPTIME is a Unix-like utility, providing the same functionality as the Unix 'uptime' command. Javier recently released UPTIME 2.60, which you can get from his UPTIME Sourceforge release.