Welcome to FreeDOS

Tech author Jeff Duntemann has released his book about FreePascal programming, for free, for anyone to use. Jeff writes on his blog: "FreePascal from Square One really is a free ebook. It’s a distillation of the four editions of my Pascal tutorial, Complete Turbo Pascal, which first appeared in 1985 and culminated in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One in 1993. I sold a lot of those books and made plenty of money, so I’m now giving it away, in hopes of drawing more people into the Pascal universe. ... If you want the book, it’s right here. You’re welcome to share it around, post it on your site, or give it to anyone who might be find it useful." We include FreePascal in the FreeDOS distribution, so this book is a great way to get started with Pascal programming on DOS. There's a link to download the book in PDF format in Jeff's announcement.

ALed is a small powerful text editor that was available as 'shareware' during the DOS era. The last version was 1.53 from April 1991. Alan Boulanger, author of ALed, has announced that the editor is now free for everyone to use. Details and downloads links at the BTTR Software forum.

Several news websites have run stories about FreeDOS 1.4 since we released the new distribution a few weeks ago, on April 5. The latest is FreeDOS 1.4 is the retrocomputing system you’ve been waiting for at All Things Open. Also check out FreeDOS 1.4 brings new fixes and features to modern and vintage DOS-based PCs at Ars Technica, FreeDOS 1.4 brings improvements to this open source DOS alternative at Liliputing, FreeDOS 1.4 released at root.cz, FreeDOS 1.4 Now Available - A Major Update for the Beloved DOS Revival at Linuxiac, FreeDOS 1.4 released with updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help at Tom's Hardware, FreeDOS 1.4 released at Hackaday, FreeDOS Celebrates More Than 30 Years of Command Prompts With New Release at Slashdot, and FreeDOS 1.4: Still DOS, still FOSS, more modern than ever at The Register.

For more FreeDOS news, also read FreeDOS 1.4 is here at Heise Online, What operating system should it be? With FreeDOS you have the choice at Office Partner, FreeDOS gets new big 1.4 update at Golem, and FreeDOS 1.4 is here at WinFuture. (Achtung bitte: These articles are in German.)

Free FDISK is a tool to manage the partitions on disks of up to 2 TiB in size using a Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table. Thanks to Bernd Böckmann, there's a new version. This is a bug fix release; from the release notes: "FAT-16 LBA (partition type 0x0e) was incorrectly shown as "FAT32 LBA" when listing logical partitions via the menu. The bug did not occur when using FDISK /info." You can get the new version at FDISK on GitHub. We've also mirrored the new release in the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio, under /freedos/files/dos/fdisk.

Thanks to SuperIlu for updating DOStodon, a client for the Mastodon federated social media network, running on DOS. SuperIlu shares these changes: "- Updated #curl to 8.13.0 - Updated #mbedTLS to 3.6.3 - Fixed #win32 version (works on #WinXP or newer), DLLs were missing." DOStodon is implemented in Javascript and relies on DOjS to run (included). Get the source code at DOStodon on GitHub.

You might know Yeo Kheng Meng as the person who wrote a DOS ChatGPT client. Recently, Yeo showed that you can run an LLM locally .. and running on DOS. Yeo's website also shows Llama2 running on FreeDOS 1.4 on Thinkpad X13 Gen 1 (2020) with Core i5-10310U 1.7Ghz. Find more details at Llama2 LLM on DOS.