FreeDOS is open source software! It doesn’t cost anything to download and use FreeDOS. You can also share FreeDOS for others to enjoy! And you can view and edit our source code, because all FreeDOS programs are distributed under the GNU General Public License or a similar open source software license.
Most people boot FreeDOS inside a PC emulator, also called a "virtual machine." One open source PC emulator is Bochs, a highly portable IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. The Bochs Project released version 2.6.11 on 05 January 2020. This is a bugfix release. You can download the new Bochs from SourceForge.
Japheth writes: "Finally, after many years of inactivity, an update to programs Jemmex/Jemm386 is available. The main reason for the update was: on 'newer' machines the available physical memory is somewhat scattered, with many holes of 'reserved' regions. The old JemmEx's built-in XMS host was unable to handle this condition, which may have resulted in far less free extended memory reported than actually existed." You can download the new version from GitHub. Source is also available at GitHub. Also mirrored in the FreeDOS files archive at Ibiblo.
mTCP is a set of TCP/IP applications for personal computers running PC-DOS, MS-DOS, FreeDOS, and other flavors of DOS. The applications include: DHCP, FTP, FTPSRV, HTGET, HTTPSERV, and other networking tools. If you have a DOS machine that needs to send data across the network mTCP can help you get that done. mTCP applications will also run in a variety of virtual and emulated environments, including VirtualBox, VMWare, and QEMU. Binaries and source code available under the GPLv3 license. You can find mTCP version 2020-01-01 at the mTCP website, also mirrored at ibiblio.
Bart Oldeman announced version 0.84pre7 of FreeCOM, the FreeDOS Command.com shell. This version is "mostly bug fixes, most importantly the stack overflows that plagues the previous prereleases. I've added Tom's check to be notified if others pop up. Some fixes for LOADFIX and LOADHIGH are included as well." Also in this release: One can also now escape the characters > < | via ^> ^< and ^| e.g. in "echo", and the GCC-compiled version is a lot smaller (almost as small as the OW-compiled version), thanks to T.K. Chia's improvements with register calling). You can download from the FreeDOS GitHub. Also mirrored here at the FreeDOS files archive on Ibiblio.
We are moving toward the FreeDOS 1.3 release. FreeDOS 1.3 Release Candidate 2 is now available for download. Please help us test this new version!
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. Most users should try the LiveCD version. You can download the new FreeDOS 1.3 RC2 from the FreeDOS file archive at ibiblio.