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Alternative OS Of The Month - August 2007

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splat

splat

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Apr 6, 2002
::::: Please post questions, reviews, comparisons to other OS's, etc in this thread :::::

August's AOSOTM is:

FreeDOS

FreeDOS Homepage said:
FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems. FreeDOS is made of up many different, separate programs that act as "packages" to the overall FreeDOS Project.
Click to expand...

Official Homepage: http://freedos.sourceforge.net/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDOS

and this is one of the reasons I picked this OS this month, even though the article is relatively old, it just popped back in to my memory: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/headunit/

Past AOSOTM:
July 2007: Haiku
June 2007: OpenSolaris
May 2007: PC-BSD
April 2007: Minix3
March 2007: ReactOS
February 2007: Debian Etch
January 2007: FreeBSD 6.1-Release
December 2006: Gentoo 2006.1
 
I was installing an update to one of the products I work on at work today, they don't tell us much about these updates just sort of hand us a disk and say install this before anything ships. Anyway what seemed to be more or less an automatic BIOS update and some security software being installed I saw "FreeDOS" scroll across the screen.

It's nice to see that even a multi billion dollar a year company that can afford to and does buy many M$ products, see's a value (no matter how small) in using this OS.
 
if this is just some boot disk floppy, whoever made it probably just used a standard freedos boot disk from the net as a base. it's great that they use it, but i'm sure if you pointed it out to anyone they would have no idea what you are talking about.
 
I love freedos because it served as a means for dell to circumvent their agreement with microsoft to sell all computers with an os. They wanted to sell some os-free computers, so they made the computers, and threw in a disc with freedos. Lol.
 
i'm at the point where if I needed a cli only, embedded type system I'd go with linux, but I can see how FreeDOS might be up some people's alley.

can anyone think of a situation where freedos would be better than using linux?
 
I've had many many many problems getting all features in Dosbox working. Having a fully MS-DOS compatible OS that's free that I can drop on an old P2 system with a SB compatible sound card is much easier to deal with.
 
Does FreeDOS support AGP video and pci sound? Old MS-DOS 6.22 won't.
 
No. It runs only in basic vga mode for me though, 640x480x16 colors, or 320x200x256 colors.

I have msdos 6.22 on one hard drive and windows 3.11, but it's impossible to make it run at a resolution higher than 640x480, and even then I only get a lousy 16 colors.

Games won't run in svga mode either. I tried Mechwarrior II, and there is no support for anything beyond "regular" vga.

Also, there is no sound at all. Nothing can find the pci sound card (sound blaster live!). I've heard that if you put in an ISA card it works, but this mb has no ISA slots.

Also, in Windows, networking seems out of the question, but that's actually a lot less important to me than sound/video. I'd like to play some older games, but it doesn't work well. I'm wondering FreeDOS might have better support for pci and agp stuff.
 
Maybe it's your driver. I get full desktop res and true colors but I have a nice nVidia RIVA TNT 16mb AGP card.
 
What driver do you choose? My card is an nvidia geforce.
 
Ahh, it seems the Riva has drivers still but that the geforce does not. Too bad.
 
No sound and no video makes it hard to play games. I can play the basic vga and ega ones though.... just no sound.
 
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