Welcome to FreeDOS

Xcopy is an essential DOS command that copies files and directories. Jeremy has released a new version of Xcopy that fixes several bugs: "fix bug causing timestamps to not always be set correctly - fix bug causing stack corruption on Open Watcom builds - improve free disk space calculation." You can find the new version 1.6 from Jeremy's Xcopy on GitHub. Thanks Jeremy!

Format is a disk formatting program. It creates FAT file systems and low-level formats floppy disks. Jeremy has published a new version of FreeDOS Format to fix several reported bugs, and merged a pull request adding 128KB cluster support. You can download the new version from FreeDOS Format at GitHub.

SvarCOM is a command shell for DOS, like command.com but meant to be a minimalist shell replacement. Mateusz Viste recently released SvarCOM ver 2024.3, the new version of SvarCOM, which supports $v, $d and $t tags in the prompt, and fixed COMMAND/C processing of batch files and FOR loops. You can download from the SvarCOM website. SvarCOM is distributed under the MIT license.

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!