FreeDOS's Linux Roots
linuxjournal.com
linuxjournal.com
WHY did you need DOS??? Use an XP VM? Some sort of Linux emulator? Flashing the firmware on a device manufactured long after the existence of DOS had been forgotten for most major hardware producers...
so many questions!
The alternative is correctly disabling the device under Windows/Linux/whatever, flashing the firmware, and re-enabling it, which is a process likely to have bugs and potentially result in bricking the device. Modern operating systems are big and constantly doing things in the background that may interfere with the firmware flashing process.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223927/why-this-linux-...
Aside: most of my interest here is classic BBS software and doors.
I remember "DOS for Dummies" (the seminal Dummies book) being helpful when I was starting out; you can probably find a used copy for the cost of shipping at this point.
I have not yet found an equivalent of the `debug` command for Linux. Ppl told me `gdb` could do the same but I found debug easier to use.
More modern formats (be it PE, ELF, Mach-o, ...) are far more complex, with many different segments, running in a more complex CPU mode, generally dynamically linked, and all the other bell and whistles. So even if you had an identical debug.exe for Linux, it would still be much harder to make sense of.
This is inaccurate. A DOS .com executable has no header whatsoever. It is literally just the program code and data with absolutely no metadata at all. It is loaded at memory address 0x100 and then execution begins, also at 0x100.
It is possible to have a 0 byte .com executable and it will perform a useful function. 0 bytes are loaded to 0x100 and then execution begins at 0x100, effectively re-running the last program run. Commonly such a file was named "go.com".
Proceed with the pitchforks and stake burning.
It has a package repository which is cool.
But DOS is DOS, it is limited. If you don't think it's cool, I guess you're outside of its scope :).
- old dos games
- turbo pascal 7 coding sessions
600kB of pure joy
taught me one thing though, having a hard coded IDE hurts. I missed emacs so damn much..
Dosemu requires you provide the OS so I use FreeDOS.
It's fine if you don't get the allure of this project. But to presume to tell someone how they should spend their own time is ridiculous to me. The creator of FreeDOS set out to do something, succeeded, and enjoyed their time doing it. And this person is telling them they're wrong.
When legacy BIOS compatibility is truly dead, I guess DOS will die with it.
But to answer the question, FreeDOS like MS-DOS and DR-DOS has drivers in the form of TSRs and DEVICE=blah.sys files. The only drivers it needs itself is for disk and basic video output, which are provided by the BIOS.
Considering it has GCC 9.1.0, I'd say it's still maintained.
Well.. targeting 8086, 80286 was somehow off the radar for a bunch of people. I think because a lot of flight ready milspec stuff ran on 6502 or 6800, and especially the latter was a classic gordon-moore model simple register==memory model, a lot more ports went into 6800(x)
Interesting to think if IBM had selected a motorola CPU like this instead of an Intel, or if Intel had been in a mood to adopt a PDP11 instruction set... what the world would be like.
As a DEC-10 and PDP11 and Vax person, I used CP/M, it was ok. I could survive. MS-DOS blind-sided me. I had no idea what was coming down the pipe. talk about walking into a room of razors with closed eyes.