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For PCs of the 1980-2000 era
SvarDOS is an open-source project that aims to integrate the best of the currently available DOS tools, drivers, and games. DOS development was abandoned by commercial players long ago, mostly in the early nineties. Nowadays it survives only through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but it is a highly sparse and disorganized ecosystem. The goal of SvarDOS is 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 capable of running on 8086 PCs).
Minimalist and 8086-compatible
Once installed, SvarDOS is a minimal DOS system that provides 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 has been taken to ensure that 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 only applies to SvarDOS-specific files, however – support packages supplied with SvarDOS may be subject to different licenses (GPL, BSD, public domain, freeware…).
multilingual
The system can be installed in different languages: English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Italian and more.
No “version”
SvarDOS is a rolling release, meaning it does not follow the concept of “versions”. Once the system is installed, its packages can be kept up to date using the SvarDOS online update tools (pkg and pkgnet).
Community and Support
Need to get in touch? Do you want to submit some packages, translate SvarDOS into your language, or otherwise contribute? Or perhaps you would like some information about SvarDOS? Come visit the SvarDOS community forum. You might also want to take a look at the project’s bug tracker.
download
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 for installing the bare-bones SvarDOS system. If you want a CD image that contains a lot of additional packages, you may want to look here.
bns build (20250427)
A “talking” version for blind persons. PROVOX uses a screen reader and requires a Braille ‘n Speak synthesizer connected to the COM1 port. If running as a VM, BNS can be emulated.
bleeding edge
⚠ This build has not been fully tested! Let us know how it works for you.
The above links point to the latest build of the installation images. The archive can be found in the creation file section.
development 🔧
Wondering how SvarDOS is made? All build-related files, scripts, and sources of SvarDOS-specific tools are stored on the project’s SVN server. To pull sources using the standard Subversion client:svn co svn://svn.svardos.org/svardos svardos
If you just want to take a quick look, 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, development of which is maintained on the EDR github repository.
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