FreeDOS 1.2 Released With New Installer & More Commands

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 25 December 2016 at 10:36 AM EST. 3 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
The latest open-source project doing a new release timed for Christmas is FreeDOS.

FreeDOS 1.2 was released this morning. New to FreeDOS 1.2 is a brand new installer. FreeDOS 1.2 also features updates to many of the built-in commands, some new utilities / commands, and a variety of other improvements.

FreeDOS 1.2 arrives four years after FreeDOS 1.1 and ten years since FreeDOS 1.0, representing quite a lot of changes for this project striving for a completely-free, DOS-compatible operating system. The FreeDOS developers recently described of the v1.2 milestone in some press documents:
But when you look at it, we already have that modern DOS. That's Linux. Because Linux supports multitasking, it has a flat memory model, it does all these other things. And if you want to run legacy DOS applications, you boot FreeDOS in a PC emulator like DOSEmu.

That's not DOS. FreeDOS is still DOS, and needs to remain DOS. So we agreed the next version after FreeDOS 1.1 would be an update to FreeDOS. That's why this version is FreeDOS 1.2.

FreeDOS 1.2 is still DOS, but it's more than a mere update of FreeDOS 1.1. We've made some significant improvements.

The first thing you'll notice in FreeDOS 1.2 is the brand-new installer. Jerome Shidel wrote a new installer for us, and it looks really good! The new installer is very simple—for both new and experienced FreeDOS users. If you've used FreeDOS before, the installer will feel very familiar. At the same time, if you're completely new to FreeDOS, you'll have an easy time.

We've also included new programs and utilities in FreeDOS 1.2. In this release, we finally include some games. Since so many people use FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, it seemed a good idea to include some open source DOS games for people to try.

And we include a bunch of new utilities that we hope people will find useful. More developer utilities, more user utilities. For example, we now include some programs to help you play sounds and update graphic files. We also provide other tools that help you connect to a network, including a DOS web browser.

The additional programs also make the new FreeDOS 1.2 distribution a lot bigger. The FreeDOS 1.1 distribution was about 40MB. The new FreeDOS 1.2 comes in several “flavors.” The “Lite” installer is about 30MB, and the “Full” installer is 415MB. Both are USB-based installers; you can write them to a USB fob drive and boot your computer with that to install FreeDOS. We also provide a CDROM installer that's 419MB, and an alternate CDROM installer that's the same size. (The difference between the two CDROM installers is that one is intended for certain older computers that need to boot from CDROM in a particular way.)

More details and downloads for FreeDOS 1.2 via SourceForge.
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