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After a long and tough year, I've been looking forward to once again sharing my love of Python and open source software with other people, especially middle and high school students. Before the pandemic, I co-wrote a grant to teach Python programming to middle school students using Raspberry Pi computers. Like many other plans, COVID-19 put mine on hold for over a year. Fortunately, vaccines and the improved health in my state, New York, have changed the dynamic.

Editing files is a staple on any operating system. Whether you want to make a note about something, write a letter to a friend, or update a system configuration file—you need an editor. And FreeDOS provides a user-friendly text editor called (perhaps unimaginatively) "FreeDOS Edit."

The simplest invocation of FreeDOS Edit is just EDIT. This brings up an empty editor window. The patterned background suggests an empty "desktop"—a reminder that you aren't editing any files.

HATEOAS is a difficult-to-pronounce acronym that stands for "Hypertext As The Engine Of Application State." Invented by Roy Fielding in the year 2000, HATEOAS was proposed as an architectural style for network-based software systems.

In my previous article on talent development in open organizations, I explained how senior and upper-level managers can help young leadership talent develop without taking an entirely "hands off" approach. The truth is that leadership talent rarely develops on its own, and if organizations wishing to become more open want to see open leaders thrive, upper management has a specific job to do.

Let's face it. The point of technology is to make life better.

Of course, what qualifies as "better" varies for people, depending on what they need at any given moment. Still, technology has the unique ability to affect lives at many different stages. For some people, technology offers a relaxing afternoon of entertainment, while for others, it provides navigational assistance, improved health care, or more precise scientific research.

On Linux, you may have used a package manager to install or remove packages. For example, the default package manager on Debian Linux is the deb command, and the default package manager on Fedora Linux is the dnf command. But did you know that FreeDOS has a package manager, too?

In this series celebrating Kubernetes' 11th birthday, I've introduced some great tools for chaos engineering. In the first article, I explained what chaos engineering is, and in the second, I demonstrated how to get your system's steady state so that you can compare it against a chaos state.

The rising popularity of serverless development alongside the increased adoption of multi- and hybrid-cloud architectures has created a lot of competition among platforms. This gives developers many choices about where they can run functions on serverless platforms—from public managed services to on-premises Kubernetes.

The main configuration file for FreeDOS is a file in the root directory called FDCONFIG.SYS. This file contains a series of lines, each setting a value such as LASTDRIVE=Z or FILES=40. For example, the default FDCONFIG.SYS in FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 looks like this:

Read on to learn more about what made news in the open source world last month.

A wave of new artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT)-connected tools has reached the agricultural space. The Linux Foundation announced a new project, called AgStack Foundation, to boost open source infrastructure across global agriculture.

Do you ever feel nostalgic for Doom and other blocky video games, the ones that didn't require much more than a mouse and the hope that you could survive on a LAN with your friends? You know what I'm talking about; the days when your weekends were consumed with figuring out how you could travel with your desktop and how many Mountain Dews you could fit in your cargo pants pockets? If this memory puts a warm feeling in your heart, well, this article is for you.

Many people consider tuning database queries to be some mysterious "dark art" out of a Harry Potter novel; with the wrong incantation, your data turns from a valuable resource into a pile of mush.

One thing I appreciate from growing up with DOS computers is that the boot process is relatively easy to understand. There aren't a lot of moving parts in DOS. And today, I'd like to share an overview of how your computer boots up and starts a simple operating system like FreeDOS.

Community managers, maintainers, and foundations seek metrics and insights about open source communities. Because each open source project works differently, its data needs to be analyzed differently. Yet, all projects share common challenges with getting data and creating visualizations. This presents an ideal use case for an open source project to solve this problem generically with the capability to customize it to users' needs.

Compiling source code produces a binary. During compilation, you can provide flags to the compiler to enable or disable certain properties on the binary. Some of these properties are relevant to security.

Checksec is a nifty little tool (and shell script) that, among other functions, identifies the security properties that were built into a binary when it was compiled. A compiler might enable some of these properties by default, and you might have to provide specific flags to enable others.

I have covered multiple chaos engineering tools in this series.

Even if you haven't used DOS before, you are probably aware of its command-line shell, named simply COMMAND.COM. The COMMAND.COM shell has become synonymous with DOS, and so it's no surprise that FreeDOS also implements a similar shell called "FreeCOM"—but named COMMAND.COM just as on other DOS systems.

For some teachers, summer is here and thus a long (hopefully, relaxing) break. All the teachers I know are proud lifelong learners, though, and at the end of the summer break there's a new school year awaiting. To help you get the most out of your summer, but also satiate the real need to plan for the coming school year, we've collected some of our favorite concise guides to help you plan.

I am a control freak. I like to be in control. I got my pilot’s license so I could fly an airplane for fun, but it also helped me understand what is happening when I fly commercial. So now I find myself explaining to other travelers that, while not a normal occurrence, landing with the malfunctioning flaps in the up position is something that all pilots train extensively for. Yes, that is something that happened to my wife and me on a commercial flight a couple of years ago.

A useful feature in almost every command-line environment is the environment variable. Some of these variables allow you to control the behavior or features of the command line, and other variables simply allow you to store data that you might need to reference later. Environment variables are also used in FreeDOS.