FreeDOS, the free and open-source alternative to Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS), just released a new major update. It still has excellent compatibility with MS-DOS software, including Windows 3.1 and earlier, and many of the built-in packages have been updated with new features and fixes.
The FreeDOS project has been around since 1994, and it originally aimed to create a free and open-source clone of MS-DOS, which was the most popular operating system for PCs at the time. Microsoft stopped supporting MS-DOS as a standalone operating system after the release of Windows 95, but the FreeDOS project continued chugging along. Today, it’s a great drop-in replacement for MS-DOS for virtual machines or legacy PCs, and it can boot natively on many PCs.
What’s New in FreeDOS 1.3
FreeDOS 1.3 includes updated versions of many system packages, including the command line interpreter FreeCOM, the filesystem tools Xcopy and Move, and the Fdisk partitioning utility. The mTCP package, which includes applications for networking, has received some reliability improvements. There’s also a completely rewritten version of FDHelp, the built-in help system.
The blog post explained, “We did some package cleanup along the way. For example, FreeDOS has long focused on a command line experience that is typical of classic DOS. However, we’ve included some graphical desktops in previous distributions, including OpenGEM, Seal, and oZone. However, Seal and oZone were quite buggy; we decided to drop these from the new distribution. […] We also replaced the BMP2PNG program with another program, DOSVIEW.”
The core FreeDOS kernel is still unchanged from the previous FreeDOS 1.2 release, which means Windows 3.1 still can’t run in 386 Enhanced Mode with more memory available to applications. The code changes required for that functionality have been in testing for a few years, but it’s still not quite ready. FreeDOS can still run Windows 3.1 and earlier versions in standard mode, but if you want the best possible experience on an old PC, you should stick to MS-DOS 6.22.
Thankfully, compatibility with MS-DOS games and applications should still be nearly perfect. That includes Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, early versions of Microsoft Word and WordPerfect, Commander Keen, Lotus 1-2-3, Oregon Trail Deluxe, Jill of the Jungle, Duke Nukem, and many other programs.
The announcement post also said, “A few updates didn’t make it into the FreeDOS 1.4 distribution. For example, a few programs released updates in the days before the final FreeDOS 1.4 release, like the Blocek text editor (version 1.76) and that was too late to include them. These programs will get included in upcoming monthly test releases.”
Download FreeDOS
You can download FreeDOS from the project’s website. The live CD download is perfect for installing FreeDOS in a virtual machine or hardware, since it gives you a bootable environment to try out in addition to the installer. There’s also a USB image for installing FreeDOS on PCs that support USB boot.
For older PCs, FreeDOS also has a ‘LegacyCD’ image that uses a different boot method for better compatibility. Finally, there’s a ‘Floppy Edition’ that fits on 720kB, 1.2MB, or 1.44MB floppy disks. The project says that should work on “any original IBM PC system, including the PC, XT, and AT.”
FreeDOS is still a 16-bit x86 operating system, so it can only boot or be virtualized on x86 PCs. If you have a Snapdragon X Elite PC, a Mac with an Apple Silicon chip, or some other non-x86 hardware architecture, you have to emulate it with QEMU or another similar tool.
