FreeDOS 1.3 Released To Advance This Open-Source MS-DOS Replacement

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeDOS 1.3 Released To Advance This Open-Source MS-DOS Replacement

FreeDOS 1.2 released back on Christmas 2016 and now a half-decade later has finally been succeeded by FreeDOS 1.3 for advancing this open-source alternative to MS-DOS...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeDOS-1.3-Released

[kylew77]

Very cool little project. I remember how long it took them to reach version 1.0. Curious what the max ram support for it is, can it go all the way up to 4GB or even more with PAE or is it limited to a lot lower amount.

[CochainComplex]

does it have hidpi and hdr support?

edit: sounds like a joke but with 4k on a laptopscreen a normal linux terminal can be quite small. imagine just 8k displays and you won't be able to use it without a magnifing glass.

[Rob72]

does it have hidpi and hdr support?

edit: sounds like a joke but with 4k on a laptopscreen a normal linux terminal can be quite small. imagine just 8k displays and you won't be able to use it without a magnifing glass.

I pretty much need a magnifying glass to read text on my 14" ThinkPad with 4K display (when the kernel is booting, or during GRUB). Luckily the text size of grub and the kernel output can be adjusted...

[kylew77]

I pretty much need a magnifying glass to read text on my 14" ThinkPad with 4K display (when the kernel is booting, or during GRUB). Luckily the text size of grub and the kernel output can be adjusted...

I can't even stand a full 1080p display on my linux laptop. I have to use scaling to be able to read anything my vision is so bad that is why I know 4k is NOT for me! I did 1024 x 768 for years even when my monitors supported higher resolutions.

[furtadopires]

FreeDOS saved my life some years ago when I had to upgrade the bios of a lot of intel motherboards (those old green ones) in the company, because their stock bios had a bug that would hang the boot process if a usb keyboard was plugged in.

Got a pendrive, made a FreeDOS bootable device using Rufus, put the "new" bios file on the root directory and did the work

[skeevy420]

does it have hidpi and hdr support?

edit: sounds like a joke but with 4k on a laptopscreen a normal linux terminal can be quite small. imagine just 8k displays and you won't be able to use it without a magnifing glass.

From what I can tell the options are to play with the font sizes until you find something that works for you or to use a VM that supports scaling from Linux or ClosedDOS.

On my 4K TV the font size between GRUB and the OS is about a 1/4" tall. I've been known to use my phone to take pictures of my boot errors so I can zoom in and actually read what happened....well, usually it's what didn't happen....

[billyswong]

I can't even stand a full 1080p display on my linux laptop. I have to use scaling to be able to read anything my vision is so bad that is why I know 4k is NOT for me! I did 1024 x 768 for years even when my monitors supported higher resolutions.

I assume 4k laptops are designed for integer 3x scaling. 1080p laptop aren't suited for 2x scaling as 540 logical pixels height is not tall enough for many GUI. So if your OS / DE / applications don't support native fractional scaling, things may feel blurry or ugly.

[tildearrow]

There are three uses for FreeDOS:
- nostalgia and/or retro-computing
- firmware updates
- *still* installed by vendors when you select a No Operating System option, even on UEFI

[numacross]

There are two uses for FreeDOS:
- nostalgia and/or retro-computing

I don't know what you consider "retro", but there's still plenty of usable hardware that has BIOS/firmware updates shipped as FreeDOS-compatible executables. Dell for example still ships their BIOS updates as a hybrid Windows/MS-DOS/UEFI Capsule .exe files.
It's not that hard to rig up a FreeDOS PXE image that will autoupdate a BIOS when booted over the network, I've had to do it in the past because the Windows-based updater was bugged and didn't want to work in unattended mode.

- *still* installed by vendors when you select a No Operating System option, even on UEFI

What else would you make them do? It's a fast and easy way of testing if the computer boots at all. It might be harder now, since Intel doesn't mandate CSM, but most vendors still keep it.