If you aren't sure how to contribute to FreeDOS, or want to contribute in a new way, we'd like to encourage you to write about FreeDOS. Write about something that interests you! Others will want to see how you're using FreeDOS, to run existing programs or to write your own programs. We want to hear from everyone! It's not just about developers, or people who contribute to FreeDOS through code. Tell us how you use FreeDOS.

Post on your own blog, or email your articles to me and I'll put them up as a guest post on the FreeDOS Blog. If we can gather enough articles by Spring, we'll try to collect them in a "how-to" ebook in time for the 24th "birthday" of FreeDOS on June 29.

Jerome writes about a new disk image tool he created: "To make a long story short(er), I recently acquired a 5.25" 1.2MB floppy drive to image a box of ancient disks I had laying around. As so many things in life go, only a few diskettes in and problems reading a couple occurred. The normal DOS disk image creation tool just didn’t feel up to the task. So, I created a new utility that may have better results. It is called the Enhanced Disk Image Creation Tool (EDICT) for DOS. It will try really hard to get the job done. Anyhow, edict is available for alpha testing by the brave of heart." You can download it from the EDICT website.

On Nov. 29, hpa and pals released NASM 2.13.02. Noticeable changes: -- option -MW to quote dependency outputs according to Watcom Make conventions instead of POSIX Make conventions (see Section 2.1.11), -- the obj output format now contains embedded dependency file information, unless disabled with %pragma obj nodepend (see Section 7.4.9). For full revision history, see here. Download binaries and (BSD 2-clause) sources at their website or mirrored at iBiblio under /devel/asm/nasm/ .

On Nov. 28, the FreePascal developers released FPC 3.0.4, a minor bugfix release. You can read user changes, read the online docs, or download binaries and GPLv2 sources from either SourceForge or iBiblio mirror. Note that cross-compilers for the i8086-msdos target exist (but still not for Go32v2 host yet ... use HX!).

Gregory Pietsch writes with news about FreeDOS Edlin: "Just in time for Christmas, I received notification of a bug in FreeDOS Edlin. The bug happened when the user attempts to open a non-existent file. Well, in version 2.17, it's a bug no more! I also cleaned up the configure script a little, because the old configure.in file looked past its prime and had stuff in it that I wasn't using." You can find it at FreeDOS Edlin at SourceForge. Thanks!