On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 5:09 PM ioan via Freedos-user
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hello! I have a few questions about Freedos: I recently became interested
> in Freedos, but during installation I noticed that there are only a
> few languages available. I would like there to be more languages, but
> personally, Ukrainian is important to me.
Ukrainian is not currently supported -- but feel free to add this.
FreeDOS uses a translation library which makes it possible to support
new languages without having to recompile or "rebuild" the software.
Look for the language files in the C:\FREEDOS\NLS directory. You
should see these organized as "filename" dot "2-letter language" -- so
that's "FIND.EN" for the messages for the FIND command in English, or
"TREE.DE" for the TREE command in German.
The NLS path and language variable should be set automatically, based
on what you selected during the installation. But you can always set
it by yourself from the command line. Use the NLSPATH variable to set
the directory for the language files, and the LANG variable to set the
language.
Here's an example that shows how to set this up for German ("DE") and
run the TREE/? command to see it in German:
:: C:\>set NLSPATH=C:\freedos\nls
:: C:\>set LANG=de
:: C:\>tree /?
:: Zeigt die Vereichnisstruktur eines Laufwerks oder Pfades grafisch an.
:: TREE [Laufwerk:][Pfad] [/F] [/A]
:: /F Zeigt die Dateinamen in jedem Verzeichnis an.
:: /A Verwendet ASCII anstatt des erweiterten Zeichensatzes.
:: Copyright 1995, 2000 Dave Dunfield - frei verteilbar (seit 2000 unter GPL).
:: Benutzt Jim Halls <[email protected]> Cats Library
:: Copyright (C) 1999,2000,2001 Jim Hall
Or to print the messages in Spanish ("ES"):
:: C:\>set LANG=es
:: C:\>tree /?
:: Visualiza gr ficamente la estructura de directorios de un disco o ruta.
:: TREE [unidad:][ruta] [/F] [/A]
:: /F Visualiza los nombres de los archivos en cada directorio.
:: /A Utiliza el ASCII en vez de caracteres extendidos.
:: Copyright 1995, 2000 Dave Dunfield - De libre distribuci¢n (bajo
GPL en el 2000
:: ).
:: Utiliza la biblioteca Cats de Jim Hall <[email protected]>
:: version 3.8 Copyright (C) 1999,2000 Jim Hall
The language files are just text files, so you can write your own and
test them out. Once you have a working version in Ukrainian, please
share them so we can include them in the next version. (See below
about the monthly test releases.)
>
> My next question is why I have to provide my SourceForge email address,
> but I don't understand why.
I don't understand this question. Where are you being prompted to
enter an email address?
For example, to download FreeDOS, you start at
https://www.freedos.org/ and click on "Download FreeDOS 1.4" (the big
blue button) to get to https://www.freedos.org/download/
And from there, you can click on what files you want to download, and
it should just download. You don't need to enter an email address to
do that.
>
> My third question is how can I change or write my own keyboard layout? I
> can use Colemak or Workman, for example.
You can use the KEYB command to load a keyboard layout. I don't know
about Colemak or Workman (I use QWERTY) but maybe someone else here
can answer this.
>
> Fourth: how actively is Freedos being developed? Does it depend on anyone
> or anything?
Development has slowed ("DOS" stopped being a moving target in 1995)
but is still going on. Thanks to Jerome, we have a test release with
the latest updates that gets released every month. If you want to try
it, you can find the test release here:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/
The test releases are indicated with "T" for "Test" plus a 2-digit
year and 2-digit month. So T2601 (January 2026) is the test release
that came out last week. T2512 (December 2025) is the previous test
release (you can find this in the "test.old" directory).
We test things in the monthly test releases so that we can see
everything working together. If we need to make a structural change to
the distribution, we do it there so everyone can test all changes at
the same time. When there are enough updates and patches to warrant a
new version of the FreeDOS distribution, we'll "promote" the test
release to become 1.5 or 2.0 (whatever we end up calling it). That's
how we've made the last few releases, and it works very well.
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