SvarDOS – an open-source DOS distribution
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for PCs of the 1980-2000 era
SvarDOS is an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games. DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a long time ago, mostly during early nineties. Nowadays it survives solely through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but this is a highly sparse and unorganized ecosystem. SvarDOS aims to collect available DOS software and make it easy to find and install applications using a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get, but for DOS and able to run on a 8086 PC).
Minimalist and 8086-compatible
Once installed, SvarDOS is a minimalistic DOS system that offers only a DOS kernel, a command interpreter and the most basic tools for system administration. It is then up to the user to install additional packages. Care is taken so SvarDOS remains 8086-compatible, at least in its most basic (core) configuration.
Open-source
SvarDOS is published under the terms of the MIT license. This applies only to SvarDOS-specific files, though – the auxilliary packages supplied with SvarDOS may be subject to different licenses (GPL, BSD, Public Domain, Freeware…).
Multilingual
The system can be set up in a wide selection of languages: English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Italian and more.
No “versions”
SvarDOS is a rolling release, meaning that it does not adhere to the concept of “versions”. Once the system is installed, its packages can be kept up-to-date using the SvarDOS online update tools (pkg & pkgnet).
Community and help
Need to get in touch? Wish to submit some packages, translate SvarDOS to your language, or otherwise contribute? Or maybe you’d like some information about SvarDOS? Come visit the SvarDOS community forum. You may also wish to take a look at the project’s bug tracker.
Downloads
SvarDOS is available in a variety of installation images for different sizes of floppy disks. The CD image presented below contains only a virtual floppy to install the bare-bone SvarDOS system. If you’d like a CD image that contains lots of extra packages, you may want to look here.
BNS build (20250427)
A “talking” version for blind persons. Uses the PROVOX screen reader and requires a Braille ‘n Speak synthesizer connected to the COM1 port. If running as a VM, the BNS can be emulated.
Bleeding edge
⚠ This build has not been thoroughly tested! Let us know how it works for you.
The links above point to the latest builds of installation images. Archival builds can be found in the files section.
Development 🔧
Wondering how SvarDOS is built? All the build-related files, scripts and sources of SvarDOS-specific tools are stored on the project’s SVN server. To pull the sources using the standard subversion client use:svn co svn://svn.svardos.org/svardos svardos
If you only wish to take a quick peek, then we provide a read-only mirror of the SvarDOS subversion tree on github where you can easily browse the development tree.
SvarDOS uses a fork of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel, whose development is kept on the EDR github repository.
