After three years of development a stable version of the operating system Freedos 1.4 has been published, offering a free alternative to DOS with utilities from GNU. The code for Freedos is distributed under the GPLV2 license. Various assembly options for loading CDs, CD and USB Flash drives ranging in size from 17 MB to 638MB are available for download.
The Freedos project was established in 1994 and currently has various applications such as pre-installing minimal environments for new computers, running old games, working on built-in technologies like POS-terminals, teaching operating system basics to students, using in emulators, creating CD/Flash drives for installing firmware and configuring motherboards.
The main capabilities of Freedos include:
- Support for FAT32 and long file names.
- Ability to launch network applications.
- Implementation of disc cache.
- Support for memory control systems HIMEM, EMM386 and UMBPCI, as well as the memory manager Jemm386.
- Printing system support; Drivers for CD-ROM and mice.
- Support for ACPI, temporary sleep mode and energy-saving operations.
- MPXPlay media player with MP3, OGG, and WMV support.
- XDMA and XDVD-UDMA drivers for hard drives and DVD drives.
- Cutemouse mouse driver.
- Utilities for working with 7zip, Info-Zip Zip, and Unzip archives.
- Text editors Edit, Setedit, and Viewer PG.
- Freecom command shell with file auto-fill support.
- Network support, Links and Dillo web browsers, Bittorrent client.
- A shell fdtui with a user interface.
- Package manager included.
- DJGPP Linux programs.
- High-performance network applications MT