Welcome to FreeDOS

Gregory Pietsch has been working on libfp, a floating point library. Gregory explains: "This library is supposed to be the complement to libmpi in the C runtime library." Gregory asks all interested developers to test it out; you can share feedback on the freedos-devel email list. The libfp library is in the public domain, and you can download version "zero point zero" at /devel/libs/libfp on the FreeDOS FIles Archive at Ibiblio.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for a very special virtual get-together on Saturday morning to celebrate our 30th anniversary! We like to meet virtually every month or so, to connect in real time and get to know each other as more than just an email address. We alternate topics for the get-together, and this month was social time. We'll see you again on August 4 for a technical discussion - this is a great opportunity for live debugging or discussing technical issues.

And thanks for joining the VCF Live Stream, hosted by Jeff Brace from the Vintage Computer Federation. Jim talked about what DOS and DOS apps were like in the 1980s and 1990s, and what led up to the announcement of the FreeDOS Project on June 29, 1994. He also showed how to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine, using QEMU. You can watch a recording of the Live Stream on YouTube.

The FreeDOS Project officially started on June 29, 1994. And today, that makes us 30 years old! 30 years is a long time for any open source project, and it's because of our community of developers and users. If you've written code, translated messages, added features, fixed bugs, written documentation, or contributed to FreeDOS in any other way: Thank you for making FreeDOS cool.

To read more about the history of FreeDOS, check out these articles at Ars Technica, How-To Geek, Udaipur Kiran, Opensource.net, Adafruit, Tom's Hardware, LWN.net, Both.org, and All Things Open. Also watch this interview by 'My Open Source Experience' about FreeDOS, about supporting an open source community, and these interview "extras" about how people use FreeDOS and engaging the community. If you want to write an article about FreeDOS, you can find more history and background information in our press kit.

As we get closer to the 30th anniversary on June 29, we're starting to see news items and articles about FreeDOS. Here's a quick roundup from the last week: {1} SourceForge posted an interview with Jim about FreeDOS at 30 years. It's a long read but full of great notes and history. {2} Slashdot ran a story about 30 years of FreeeDOS with a link to a February article about looking ahead to 30 years of FreeDOS. {3} Hackaday also wrote about nearly 30 years of FreeDOS and looking ahead to the future. If you know of other places that have written about FreeDOS, let us know.

Also check out Lukas's presentation at DevConf.CZ 2024 about FreeDOS and QEMU on YouTube - we linked to DevConf last week, but this is a direct link to Lukas's presentation on YouTube.

DOG is an alternative DOS command line shell. Wolf writes: "After 22 years of being dormant I recently re-discovered the joy of DOS and my old DOG project. Today I'm proud to release version 0.8.4b together with a migration to GitHub and a brand new website. You can find the new DOG Operating Guide and the GitHub project. Please give it a spin, and if you find bugs or have feature requests, please report them in GitHub." This version includes: - Restored the old DOG prompt as the default when no PROMPT variable is set - HH utilizes HELP to display more thorough help texts, through the alias HH - Updated the IF syntax to be more versatile and to be similar with DO - Fixed the Control-C implementation - Fixed environment initialization and management. Welcome back, Wolf - and thanks for the new release!

Gregory Pietsch's libm is a public domain math library for programmers. Gregory recently released version 0.8 with fixes to the tanh and csqrt functions. Please help test this new release; send feedback to the freedos-devel email list. You can download it from the FreeDOS Files Archive, hosted at Ibiblio, under /devel/libs/libm.

The FreeDOS Project will turn 30 years old on June 29. That's a long time for any open source software project! We've been celebrating by sharing articles and presentations about FreeDOS. Here are some recent items: Lukas talked about FreeDOS and QEMU {skip ahead to about 3:36:00 in the video}, Jim wrote about Looking ahead to 30 years of FreeDOS and Looking ahead to 30 years of FreeDOS {repeat of the other article}.

If you plan to write an article about FreeDOS, please check out our press kit with information, quick facts, logos, and screenshots.

If you're new to FreeDOS and want to install it for yourself, you can install on real hardware or in a virtual machine. We usually recommend a virtual machine, but you can also use an old PC or purchase a new "retro" computer. To install on a virtual machine, you can watch the video about How to install FreeDOS on VirtualBox or read this article series: How I boot FreeDOS using QEMU {overview} and Running FreeDOS on Linux with QEMU {basic setup} and How to run DOS apps on Linux {sound setup}, or read our wiki page about installing on QEMU. To learn about running FreeDOS on a classic PC, you can read Running FreeDOS on the Pocket386 or watch the video FreeDOS running on real hardware or read our wiki page about installing FreeDOS on the Pocket386.

For a bit of tech trivia, also read Why DOS has 16 colors.