Welcome to FreeDOS

Please help us test the next version of FreeDOS! Thanks to Jerome, our distribution manager, we are able to share a new "test" distribution every month. These monthly releases collect all new changes, and act as a "test bed" to become the next official FreeDOS distribution, and we would like your help to test it. The new "T2609" ("T" for test, "26" for 2026, "09" for September) distribution includes an update to UPX and several new translations. Since August, we've also included an updated kernel and other tools. Download the test release and let us know if you have any problems.

Mysysinf is a DOS port of the "Neofetch" system information utility from Linux and other Unix-like systems. Laaca has released a new update to Mysysinf: "Fritz kindly sent me files with program messages of utility Mysysinf translated to many other languages: Danish, Esperanto, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Dutch, Norwegian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovakian, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainan. I repacked the program (the binary is unchanged)." You can download it directly as a zip file from Laaca's website. We also mirrored this version in the FreeDOS Files Archive at ibiblio, under /util/system/mysysinf

Bernd has shared Chksum, a new checksum tool for DOS. Bernd writes: "The following checksum algorithms are supported in this first release: Cryptographic checksum algorithms: - md5 (default) - sha-1, sha-224, sha-256, - sha3-224, sha3-256, sha3-384 and sha3-512. Non-cryptographic checksum algorithms: - bsdsum (16-bit BSD checksum) - fletcher16 (modulo 255), fletcher32 (modulo 65535) - adler32 - crc32 (polynome 0x04C11DB7) and crc32c (polynome 0x1EDC6F41)." Chksum should work on all systems, from an 8088 upwards, and is released under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) version 1.2. You can download version 1 from Disroot. The source code is a Fossil repository.

Updated: Bernd has released version 2. Major changes include: SHA-384, SHA-512 and MD4 are now supported, 32-bit executable CHKSUM32.EXE built with DJGPP is provided. You can download version 2 from Disroot, plus the source code. Thanks Bernd!

Blocek is a text editor for DOS. Unlike other text editors, Blocek works in graphical mode, can work with very large files and can edit texts in Unicode UTF-8 format, which makes it very useful especially for non-English texts. Laaca would like to release a new version by the end of August, and is looking for feedback on a work-in-progress version. "The two main news are monospaced editing mode: 'i' and 'O' have the same width and improvement in the internal keyboard handler which allows you to create layouts with use of Alt+key." Download the new version {zip file} and try it out. "If you are interested, you are encouraged to find bugs and update the translations of the keyboard layout files. Information which text strings have changed since last version you can find in file translat_2_trans.txt".

Oberon is Niklaus Wirth's successor to Pascal and Modula-2 — a small, strongly-typed systems language. This project implements a practical DOS dialect of Oberon-07: the core language "plus what real 16-bit systems programming needs." Programmers who are interested in experimenting with a programming language that was meant to succeed Pascal, find it at DosWorld's Trubo Oberon at GitHub.

Michael Brutman created an interesting project, a basic packet driver that enables you to use the DaynaPORT SCSI/Link Ethernet device under DOS. These devices were usually used on early Macintosh computers which had SCSI controllers but not much else for expandability. Today these devices are somewhat hard to find but they are emulated by devices like BlueSCSI and ZuluSCSI. If you would like to use the DaynaPORT for networking on FreeDOS, download it at the project on GitHub.