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Welcome to FreeDOS

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FreeDOS is an open source 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.
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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!
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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!
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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.

FreeDOS is open source software! 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.

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Latest Updates

Free FDISK 1.3.8 released

Bernd Bockmann writes: "Today I released FDISK 1.3.8 into the wild. The FDISK user interface is now translatable. Version 1.3.8 ships with translations for German, French and Turkish. Translation into Polish is in the works, and I also would like to have it available in Spanish, but have not found a translator yet." This version contains several important bug fixes, including: a bug that prevented FDISK to work for some BIOSes .. bug if the partition table cannot be written .. bug not letting the user delete the last logical drive until restart .. bug about reporting disk space .. and others. Thanks, Bernd! You can find FDISK 1.3.8 at FDISK on GitHub. We've also mirrored the release at the FreeDOS files archive at Ibiblio, under /files/dos/fdisk

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Did you know FreeDOS has a YouTube channel? We share weekly videos that show what you can do with FreeDOS. We play DOS games on FreeDOS, run classic DOS apps on FreeDOS, and sometimes teach you about programming on FreeDOS. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to find them all. Recent videos you may have missed: calculating pi by counting pixels and linear regression in a DOS spreadsheet. See also part 1 of a new video series about programming in FORTRAN77. We celebrated the 29th anniversary of FreeDOS by showing how anyone can write some of the basic tools. Sometimes we explore computing history, like how to write documents with nroff and how to use Linux like original Unix. There's also a look back at original "K+R" C programming.

Why We Love FreeDOS (ebook)

A year ago, I reached out to FreeDOS users and developers to ask why they love FreeDOS. We've collected these stories into a PDF ebook, which you can read for free, here: Why We Love FreeDOS (pdf). Thanks to everyone who responded to interviews for this ebook. I also want to thank everyone who is - or has been - part of the FreeDOS Project since 1994. You are awesome! (This ebook is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.)

Blocek 1.74

Blocek is a text editor for DOS with unicode support that allows you to edit multilanguage documents, translate texts from one language to another, and so on. Ladislav has released version 1.74 of Blocek. This release includes bookmarks, optimizations in the program messages, and bug fixes for things like text delete, and mouse wheel support. You can find the new version at the Blocek website.

Update: (7/17) Ladislav has released an updated Blocek 1.74b that provides a bug fix. If you have already downloaded Blocek 1.74, please update to version 1.74b.

Doszip Commander 2.65

The Doszip Commander is an LFN-aware TUI file manager (similar to Norton Commander) with built-in Zip and UnZip. The latest release fixes two bugs: + fixed home directory + fixed empty disk error. The second bug was if you have a formatted floppy disk that does not have a label and contains no files, Doszip could not read the floppy. Both bugs are now fixed in version 2.65. You can find it at Doszip on GitHub. We've also mirrored the new release on the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio, under /util/file/doszip-commander

Happy 29th anniversary to FreeDOS!

In 1994, several of us got together around a pretty neat idea. We liked DOS, but Microsoft was clearly moving completely to Windows. "The next version of Windows," they said, "would do away with DOS." We wanted to keep DOS around, so we decided to write our own. That project, announced 29 years ago TODAY on June 29 1994, was the FreeDOS Project. Thanks to everyone who is (or has been) part of FreeDOS! 29 years is a long time for any open source project, and I'm looking forward to more years to come.

I can't recognize everyone in one post, but it's because of people like Jerome, Ralf, Tom, Gregory, Eric, Tk Chia, Steffan, Bart, Pat, Aitor, Bernd, Wilhelm, Mercury, Michael, Paul, Liam, Bret, Rugxulo, .. and loads of other people who made FreeDOS what it is, and keep FreeDOS going. Thank you to everyone who finds and reports bugs, updates documentation, translates to other languages, fixes issues, adds new features, and writes new programs!

To celebrate our anniversary, I wanted to show that anyone can contribute to FreeDOS. It's not that hard to rewrite many the core DOS utilities, and you don't have to be an expert programmer to write your own versions of the basic tools. Check out this programming video {YouTube} to see a simple way that anyone can write their own programs that replace the standard DOS commands.

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