DOS ain't dead

Since someone was asking about packet drivers under QEMU on the freedos-user mailing list, I decided to finally just upload MetaDOS 0.2 for them/us. It's far from perfect, somewhat simplistic and rough around the edges, but (for now) it's better than nothing.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/metados/

It's only default a 600 kb .ZIP (with 3 MB .7z for full sources). You can see a listing of the .img contents here.

Features:

* simple floppy .img (minimal tools, XMS only, customizable RAM disk size)
* but a full HD install is still possible (fdisk, format, sys, bootmgr, xwcopy)
* custom FD 2041 kernel, easy to rebuild (minor patches for OLB [Eric Auer] and ctime [Matej Horvat])
* networking enabled by default for QEMU or VBox (NE2000 or PCNET), e.g. FTP (or optionally Wget or Links2, if needed)
* "fetch" to grab various files (e.g. FD "BASE" or "UTIL")
* "stubs" (to fill in gaps dynamically at runtime)
* "tests" (to prove that everything works as intended)
* "binhack" for (legally) patching binary files when needed
* "extras" that aren't crucial but still interesting
* isolation of certain settings, thus %BOOT%, %RAMDRIVE%, %EDITOR% are easily changeable (so booting USB on my old P4 as "c:" via PLoP boot manager floppy still works even if USB is forced read-only)

BTW, I do not claim that this is universally useful for all use cases, but I tried to at least accomplish something, albeit weakly. It is not meant to be a perfect solution, only a stepping stone to better ideas (I hope).

If you know of a better alternative, I'm all ears. One in particular is http://www.netbootdisk.com/ , but that hasn't been updated in five years, probably abandoned. The main problem there is that it isn't independent, so you still need to have a MS-DOS or PC-DOS system floppy, and rumor has it that Win10 doesn't include one anymore.