Explore FreeDOS with these 5 articles

FreeDOS is the little operating system that could. Created in 1994 to create an open source alternative to the MS-DOS operating system, FreeDOS has grown into a modern version of DOS. FreeDOS includes a variety of tools, compilers, editors, applications, and games that make it easy to get started with FreeDOS.

This year, we shared several articles about FreeDOS to help users explore this alternative 16-bit operating system. Here are some of the most popular articles about FreeDOS:

How I boot FreeDOS using QEMU

Many people prefer to run FreeDOS in a virtual machine or PC emulator, so they can keep using their desktop operating system while running classic DOS apps in a “window.” QEMU is one such PC emulator, installed by default on most Linux distributions. But QEMU can be a little difficult for first-time users, because you use the command line to set up a virtual machine and boot it. Here are the steps I follow to boot and install FreeDOS using QEMU on Linux.

Running FreeDOS on legacy hardware

Earlier this year, an interesting retrocomputing device hit the market: the Pocket386 (about $200) has a 386-SX CPU running at 40 MHz, with 8 MB of memory and 2 GB of storage. It also has a built-in Cirrus CL-GD542x compatible VGA card and OPL-3 sound card. Here’s how I installed FreeDOS on this legacy computer so I could run my favorite DOS applications and games.

How to upgrade your system BIOS/UEFI using FreeDOS

Upgrading your BIOS or EUFI can seem tricky for free open source software users, but it doesn’t have to be. Many motherboard manufacturers provide a DOS program to update your system’s BIOS or UEFI. David explains how he used FreeDOS to apply a BIOS update on his Linux servers.

Why DOS only has 16 colors

You may have noticed that DOS supports a color palette of just 16 text colors, and 8 background colors. You see this “16 colors” limitation repeated in other places, too. For example, while the Linux console actually supports a wide range of text colors using “escape sequences,” your terminal app only supports a basic palette of 16 colors. The origins of this range of limited colors goes back to how color was defined on an early display technology called CGA.

Celebrating 30 years of FreeDOS

I ran the DOS operating system on my PC at home since the first PC in 1981. At the time, DOS was a flexible command line operating system with a wide variety of powerful applications and fun games. I preferred DOS over Windows 3, which I found to be slow and unreliable. In 1994, Microsoft announced that DOS would go away, and the future was Windows. I realized that if programmers around the world could work together to create Linux, surely we could do the same thing with DOS. And so we announced FreeDOS 30 years ago on June 29, 1994. Here’s a first-person history of FreeDOS.