FreeDOS 1.3 Release Candidate 3 is now available! A big feature in FreeDOS 1.3 will be booting into a LiveCD. You can test this by downloading FD13-LiveCD.zip which contains the FD13LIVE.ISO installer. Most users should try the LiveCD version. The main goals for 1.3 are to provide overall improvements compared to 1.2. Some of these include a LiveCD, a Floppy Diskette Edition, some new packages, some updates packages and many improvements to the installer to provide hardware compatibility and multi-language support. Please help us to test the new Release Candidate! Download FreeDOS 1.3 RC3

This also includes a slight update to the Floppy Edition (FD13-x86.zip) that was previewed last week. The Floppy Edition is intended for those folks who run classic PC hardware that don't support CD-ROM media, and comes as a boot floppy plus six floppies containing the FreeDOS 1.3 RC3 Floppy Edition packages.

Ercan's Minibox provides a set of Unix-like commands, in an all-in-one wrapper. For example, "minibox ls" to run the "ls" command, or "minibox cat" to run the "cat" command. Changes in 0.6 are mostly cleanup: Updated "README.md" file and "README" files including changelog of previous versions. * Deleted "binaries" directory. * Updated "Makefile" file. * Updated ".gitignore" file. * Converted forgotten files with LF line ending to CR/LF line ending. * Updated language header files. * Updated verison information. GNU General Public License version 2 and GNU General Public License version 3. You can find it on GitHub.

Post Apocalyptic Petra is a game originally written for the MS-DOS Game Jam #2 held between February 28 to May 9 2020. Most of the time what you have to do is to explore the levels, find items, lock codes and read "note disks" and emails in terminals. And some minor platforming. I'm really impressed with Post Apocalyptic Petra - it's both fun and interesting! I'd describe it as similar to Tomb Raider without the shooting. You can find source code and DOS executable are at Post Apocalyptic Petra website.

Ercan Ersoy has released a new version of his Text User Interface Shell for FreeDOS. The biggest changes is Ercan has changed the name of the project from FreeDOS TUI Shell to FDTUI. Changes in 0.4 are mostly cleanup: * Fixed help information for localization. * Fixed some typographic errors. * Updated French translations. * Updated .gitignore file. * Removed executable file on sources. * Updated LICENSE, README.md, English README and Turkish README files. * Removed French README. * Updated changelog. You can find the FDTUI project on GitHub or grab the 0.4 release (with DOS executable) at FDTUI Releases

Work on FreeDOS 1.3 has slowed since FreeDOS 1.3-RC2, but things are still moving forward. We have been tracking FreeDOS 1.3 packages on the FreeDOS wiki. Jerome has been doing most of the package work on this, and has also been working on updates to the FreeDOS 1.3 installer. We don't have the FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 ready yet, but wanted to share this extra update:

Jerome is planning to add a special "Floppy Edition" of the FreeDOS 1.3 distribution, for those folks who run classic PC hardware that don't support CD-ROM media. Jerome shares these notes on the Floppy Edition: + Should run on any PC hardware that runs FreeDOS, maybe even 8086 (requires EGA though) + Requires 720k or higher capacity floppies (not enough capacity on 360k floppies to hold everything for the installer) + Can run in advanced or automatic headless mode through command line options + Supports a preset install path from the command (for example, SETUP AUTO ADV C:FREEDOS) + Skips installing programs not supported on your CPU (on a '286, this skips 386-only programs like CWSDPMI) + Don't forget to read the Readme file.
Would you like to test the new Floppy Edition? Testers needed! You can find the test release of the new FreeDOS 1.3-RC3 Floppy Edition at our files archive on ibiblio.

Congratulations to Microsoft for recently releasing the source code to GW-BASIC under an open source license! Rich Turner (Microsoft) wrote in the announcement on the Microsoft Developer Blog: "Since re-open-sourcing MS-DOS 1.25 & 2.0 on GitHub last year, we’ve received numerous requests to also open-source Microsoft BASIC. Well, here we are! These sources, as clearly stated in the repo’s readme, are the 8088 assembly language sources from 10th Feb 1983, and are being open-sourced for historical reference and educational purposes. This means we will not be accepting PRs (Pull Requests) that modify the source in any way." You can find the GW-BASIC source code release at the GW-BASIC GitHub repo. And yes, the license indicates this is the MIT License, which makes this open source.

To anyone at Microsoft who's reading this: I'd love to see Microsoft release other DOS products under an open source license. Rich already indicated that there are no plans to release QuickBASIC as open source. But how about Word for DOS, or MS-DOS 5 EDIT, or QuickC, or other DOS applications? As "low hanging fruit," consider releasing the QBASIC demo programs (Gorillas, Nibbles, Remline, and Money) under an open source license; the BAS source code was included anyway in MS-DOS, so this should be easy. And for any applications that you can't release as open source - maybe because the source code isn't only Microsoft-owned IP, or maybe because you don't have the full source code - then I encourage Microsoft to create a website to release the original DOS applications as free (gratis) so everyone can enjoy them. - This is similar to TRIUS releasing As-Easy-As for DOS (spreadsheet) for free, including registration serial number and free manual - or Ability releasing Ability Plus 3.0 for DOS for free.