Freedos 1.1
 

I just spent a couple of hours installing Freedos 1.1 on an old P111 laptop I had laying around. I also installed OpenGEM6, Volkov Commander, and Arachne 1.95. Arachne was frustrating until I realized I was trying to install the Linux version. :-)

Anybody using Freedos for anything useful?

Can you get a latex installation working on that?

"Installation, often troublesome with (La)TeX, has been made as easy as possible: update autoexec.bat and config.sys, reboot, put all six files present in the downloaded archive (install.txt, install.bat, emtex.zip, addendum.zip, njtex.zip and zed.zip) into a single directory and run install.bat (be sure that pkunzip.exe is somewhere in a [sub]directory mentioned in the path in autoexec.bat). That's all. See install.txt for details. After another reboot you are ready to start DOSLaTeX:

DOSLaTeX was tested with FreeDOS 1.0. Known bug: EPS figures included in a document appear to be invisible when viewed with XDVI (option 3). Figures can be viewed, however, by viewing the resulting PostScript file with PSVIEW."

From here:
http://www.nomdo.dds.nl/tex.htm

I haven't tried it though.

I've just installed Freedos 1.1 in a newly bought computer. And it ran a very, very old DOS program. However, I have a chess program that I like and it refuses to run. It does not hang but exits with no messages, when trying to switch to a graphical video mode.

I tried running FreeDOS years ago just for kicks. I didn't really do a whole lot with it, but it's nice that it exists. :)