Shane Coughlan writes: "The final(?) Release Candidate of OpenGEM 7 is ready and available for testing. To try it just download the zip file from the repository and unpack to the C: drive in your relevant machine while preserving directory structure. Type GEM to execute the GEM.BAT file. If I get no feedback in the next week then I will consider the release ready and go 'gold.'" You can get the new OpenGEM 7 RC3 at OpenGEM on Github.

Curious what's new in this release? Shane adds: "By the way, this RC saw some big changes: - Updated README.TXT and GUIDE.TXT - Updated GEM.BAT file (notices) - Updated SETUP.BAT file (notices and pause feature) - Updated CuteMouse driver from 1.9 to 2.1b4 - Changed SHUTDOWN 1.2 abandonware to SHUTDOWN 1.1 and REBOOT 1.0."

OpenGEM is a non-multitasking 16-bit graphical user interface (GUI) for DOS. It is an extended, open source software distribution of FreeGEM that includes features of the original Digital Research GEM. Shane Coughlan has moved the source code to OpenGEM on GitHub. If you'd like to help, grab the code! OpenGEM is distributed under the GNU GPL.

On June 29, 1994, we announced a project to create a "free DOS." And today, FreeDOS is 23 years old! All this month, we've asked people to share their FreeDOS stories about how they use FreeDOS. You can find them on our blog, including stories from Fritz, Imre, Shane, Marti, Gregory, Erwin, Rugxulo, and others. In addition, we've highlighted several interesting moments in FreeDOS history, including a history of the FreeDOS logo, a timeline of all FreeDOS distributions, an evolution of the FreeDOS website, and more. You can read everything on our celebration page at our blog: Happy 23rd birthday to FreeDOS.

Since we've received so many "FreeDOS story" contributions, I plan to collect them into a free ebook, which we'll make available via the FreeDOS website. We are still collecting FreeDOS stories for the ebook! If you would like to add your story to the ebook, send us an essay by Tuesday, July 18.

Developers have been updating and adding Unix-like utilities for FreeDOS. Javier Gutiérrez Chamorro has updated his UPTIME utility for FreeDOS. The latest version (2.40) includes separate 8086, 186 and 386 optimized versions. Previous versions added dash (-) and slash (/) switches separator, and uppercase switches. You can download it from the UPTIME website. Find all of the Unix-like utilities at the Unix directory at ibiblio.

Ercan is working on a DOS Coreutils project, to recreate several Linux commands in DOS. So far, DOS Coreutils includes commands like beep, cat, clear, cp, date, ls, mkdir/rmdir, pwd, time, and other commands. Source code is in C and compiles using OpenWatcom. Version 0.4 has minor fixes. Download from Ercan's DOS Coreutils Github.