FreeDOS 1.2
Alexander Tolstoy discovers the freshly released open source clone of the once famous DOS operating system and gets all nostalgic.
A new version of FreeDOS was released at the end of 2016, four-years after the previous update. Alexander Tolstoy digs in the DOS to see what’s new.
Reviewing FreeDOS greatly differs from playing with any of numerous Linux distribution (distros). For instance, we cannot discuss styling or an icon theme (there are no such things in DOS), neither can we estimate hardware compatibility— FreeDOS runs on every x86-based device with the exception of some very old machines (that were probably released in the early 1980s).
Still there are reasons why using FreeDOS can be justified. You may need to run old applications that are somehow tied to a specific business process that can’t be updated to use modern technology or you simply want to play retro games.
OEM vendors often ship notebooks without Windows and install FreeDOS as a placeholder. FreeDOS comes as a ZIP archive with a main image and a VMDK link file. There’s little sense in installing the system on real hardware, so the easiest way to try it out is VirtualBox. FreeDOS boots into a friendly installer, which is a brand-new addition in the 1.2 release. The installer guides you through the setup process and transfers the basic system to the newly formatted C:\ drive (you’re supposed to create another VirtualBox drive to have the installation target). Within a minute or so the installer reboots your machine and after running autoexec.bat you will see an old DOS prompt. It looks like a runlevel 3 in Unixbased systems, but without any escape to a GUI.
Many people may get stuck at this stage, because it’s not evident what to do next. Luckily, the FreeDOS project has superb (although concise) documentation that has clear and practical instructions. You can start the FreeDOS package manager fdimples to install lots of additional software, including games, development tools, text editors, network utilities and more.
DOS with bells
With regards to the venerable age of DOS, the choice of applications is impressive. There are some titles that make use of graphical mode with a mouse pointer, e.g. the FancyMines game. Although the graphical mode can be a bit slow, you may find yourself working in a fully fledged OS in some applications. In other regards, FreeDOS wants you to learn commands that differ from what you might get used to in Linux. But that’s for the legacy DOS part, because FreeDOS adds some open source Unix tools as well, such as grep and tee. You can also make your workplace more intuitive by installing and running the DosNavigator file manager—a feature-rich free clone of NortonCommander. It’s a twin-panel Swiss Army knife, that can deal with networking tasks and even has a built-in Tetris game!
We were generally pleased with the quality of FreeDOS, although the OS is definitely not for general daily use. However, it’s the best possible DOS implementation in the modern world, but despite support for mouse, USB, printing and networking it still remains a niche OS. FreeDOS can bring to life very low end PC-compatible machines, but since you can use Linux for that too, we think that the only real benefit of FreeDOS is historic applications. Apart from old games, you can run such things as Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS, which has been officially recognised as abandonware by Redmond. It reads and writes RTF, the format which is still used and supported in up-to-date office suites. Needless to say, you can run FreeDOS comfortably with a teeny weeny amount of RAM.