On Nov. 21, Jack Ellis updated his UIDE (etc.) drivers. Changes: "UHDD old style 'stand alone' driver re-added, to save 1000 bytes in UHDD.SYS! NO change to UHDD features or capabilities! Other drivers unchanged (re-dated only)." Grab binaries and sources at iBiblio under dos/cdrom/uide.

The "UIDE" drivers by Jack Ellis have all been updated to 14-Nov-2013. In this update, UHDD and UDVD2 no longer support "private" caches for user drivers. Reasons for this are a bit involved - read below. As always, you can download binaries and sources from our FreeDOS mirror at iBiblio.

An abbreviated version of Jack's detailed notes are here:
CD/DVD "private caches" were NOT needed to support CD/DVD "kiosk" systems (no hard disk), in Hong Kong or elsewhere. [...] Second, no one yet (to my knowlege) has written any other driver that "calls" UHDD or UIDE to cache its data. [...] Finally, nobody showed ANY "interest" in caching old "video game" CDs for higher game performance. Either such CDs have "disappeared", or game players must now be using RAM-disk drivers, or whatever. [...] So, the 14-Nov-2013 UHDD and UDVD2 drivers are "put back" to having a single cache, that withing UHDD. [...] Any users who ever DO need a "private cache" can get the same results by loading the RDISK driver to set a RAM-disk for their data.

On Oct. 9, Mateusz Viste released FDNPKG 0.97, the FreeDOS package (network-aware) manager. Changes: * added a new action 'listfiles' to list files owned by a package,
* added proxy support for HTTP repositories, * added slovenian translations (thanks to Matej Horvat). Grab binaries and sources at iBiblio or SourceForge or just run "fdnpkg update".

On July 30, Christophe Grenier released TestDisk 6.14, a data recover program to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again. Improvements: * testdisk /list now displays the disk model, serial number, firmware version and hpa or dco presence if detected * Recover WBFS (Wii Backup File System) partition * Make FAT RebuildBS works when there is a single FAT table * Interface: Display the partition table type if autodetected * Interface: modified warning about mismatching geometry between FAT or NTFS boot sector and HD geometry information * Interface: Remove "Allow partial last cylinder" option. Bug fixes: * Fix crc in EFI backup GPT * Rewrote how TestDisk aligns partition on cylinder or 1MB boundary: it avoids to create partition entry where the partition ends after the end of the disk. Grab binaries and sources at its homepage or mirrored on iBiblio under /util/system/testdisk.

On Sep. 25, the Beez released 4tH 3.62.1 for various OSes (including DOS). Changes: "- Named execution tokens can be defined. - Static variable and array pointers can be defined. - The library files now support virtual memory, simple garbage collection, RfC 4180 compliant parsing, SEDOL numbers, Chi square calculations, runtime macros and several new sorting routines. - Several new date and time parsing functions were added to the library. - Several beta and gamma related functions were added to the floating point libraries. - The preprocessor now supports division and modulo with the new @divrm function. - Lot's of bugfixes!" The project has moved (formerly at Google Code), so grab binaries and sources at SourceForge or its homepage or mirrored on on iBiblio under devel/forth/4th.