FreeDOS 1.3 RC2 Released With "Live CD" Support

On Christmas it will mark three years since the release of FreeDOS 1.2 while it appears FreeDOS 1.3 is right around the corner and could potentially be released around that same time. FreeDOS continues going strong as a complete DOS-compatible open-source environment and with this next release can even function as a DOS Live CD.

The big feature of FreeDOS 1.3 is "Live CD" support that can run the open-source DOS implementation live from RAM or a CD. The brief release announcement over on SourceForge sums it up as:

A big feature in FreeDOS 1.3 will be booting into a LiveCD version of FreeDOS. You can test this by downloading FD13-LiveCD.zip, which contains FD13LIVE.ISO. This media is similar to the LegacyCD. However instead of relying on the BIOS floppy disk emulation, it uses SYSLINUX and MEMDISK to boot an emulated floppy disk. Along side support to perform a Plain and Full installation FreeDOS, this media is also able to run FreeDOS live from RAM or CD (depending on computer system and hardware) without installation to an internal hard disk drive. You can also download FreeDOS 1.3 RC2 in "Full" and "Lite" versions, and a "Legacy" CDROM version that is set up to let the CDROM boot on older hardware.

This second release candidate comes ten months after FreeDOS 1.3 RC1.

While not making it for the 1.3 release, some features being talked about for the future are a 32-bit version of FreeDOS, UEFI support, and other changes as mentioned on their Wiki.