There are an increasing number of equipment manufacturers and technology groups that provide operating systems (OS) for free personal and commercial use without any cost or fee. You are sometimes even free to use them, change their source code and redistribute them as well.

Like Anything that comes for free, do not expect fancy printed manuals and CD-ROMs and technical support. Yet you can count on the community that uses these OS to provide you support through chat rooms and forums and mailing lists.

You will also note that the size of these OS range from 1 to 10 GB so if you don’t have decent broadband connection, paying for a DVD/CD-ROM might seem reasonable. Also if you are not that techie, some of these companies offer helpdesk and support contracts, which can be bought at a reasonable price.

FreeDOS

FreeDOS aims to be a complete, free, 100% MS-DOS compatible operating system (mostly achieved except Windows compatibility – Windows standard-mode works on FreeDOS, but 386-mode / WfW 3.11 does not.)

These days, there are three main uses for FreeDOS:

1. Running classic DOS games
2. Running business software that only supports DOS
3. Supporting embedded DOS systems, such as a computerized cash register or till

FreeDOS should run on any standard PC, but if you are new to DOS, we recommend you use a PC emulator to install and boot FreeDOS. You can find PC emulators for all computer platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac.) You can even run FreeDOS using a PC emulator written in Java, right in your web browser!

Click here to Download FreeDOS

RxDOS

RxDOS is a fast MS-DOS clone that supports very large disk drives, FAT32 volumes, and Windows 95/98 Long Filenames. its source code is also available free at sourceforge.

Click here to Download RxDOS

React OS

ReactOS is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

ReactOS had its origins in an older project known as FreeWin95. FreeWin95 aimed at being binary compatible with Microsoft® Windows® 95. It was founded by Yannick Majoros around 1996. But the development never took off substantially due to endless talks on design and thoughts of following the NT architecture.

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.Please bear in mind that ReactOS 0.3.7 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is not recommended for everyday use.

Click Here to Download ReactOS

OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris is an operating system (OS), an open source project licensed under CDDL, and a community. The project’s goals are innovation, collaboration, and the extension of OpenSolaris technology.OpenSolaris is free, open source, and well-suited for desktops, laptops, servers, and data centers. The quality requirement of OpenSolaris is perhaps best stated as Production Ready All The Time.

OpenSolaris technical communities maintain kernel and userland consolidations and launch new technology projects. OpenSolaris is developed by communities working in the different projects. Each project focuses on one or more specific areas of the system. The OpenSolaris developer project is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Click here to download OpenSolaris

Darwin

Darwin is the UNIX technology-based foundation of Mac OS X. Darwin integrates several technologies. Among the most important are 4.4BSD-based operating-system services (built on the Mach 3.0 microkernel), the I/O Kit, networking facilities, and support for multiple integrated file systems. Developers can use Darwin to port UNIX/Linux applications and create kernel extensions.

In addition to being part of Mac OS X, Darwin is a standalone, BSD-based operating system. (BSD, short for Berkeley Software Distribution, is a family of UNIX variants descended from Berkeley’s version of UNIX.)Darwin is also occasionally used to refer to the Darwin Streaming Server, also known as the QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS).

Click Here to download Darwin

 

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock in Madagascar for the last few years, you undoubtedly already know about the All-Star open-source applications for Windows. I’m talking about applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, OpenOffice, and VLC.

However, there are hundreds of lesser-known but highly-useful open-source applications available for Windows. A few of my favourites are below.

These applications range from moderately popular to downright obscure, but all of them are open-source and FREE. All of them are worth the install time if you have never tried them. As a side bonus, many of them are cross-platform as well.

Here they are, in random order:

1. ZScreen

ZScreen is an open-source screen capture program that quietly resides in your system tray until needed. It can take screen shots of a selected region, the active window, or the entire screen. It can even send screen captures via FTP and copy the URL to your clipboard, all with just a single keystroke. Oh yeah, it can also interface with image editing software, such as Photoshop or Paint.net.

If you frequently take screen shots, ZScreen is light years faster than pressing Print Scrn and pasting into MS Paint.

2. PDFCreator

PDFCreator allows you to create PDFs from any program that can print. Once it’s installed, simply “print” to the virtual printer that it creates, and the resulting document can be read on any computer with Adobe Reader (or comparable software).

There are several similar programs, but if you dig open-source software, PDFCreator trumps many of the others.

3. KeePass

KeePass is one of those applications that you don’t realize how badly you need until you start using it. It securely stores and manages the login information that you use for e-mail, web sites, banks, etc. Unless you always use the exact same login information (a terrible idea!), you need KeePass. It’s even available in a portable version.

I use KeePass to manage hundreds of usernames and passwords. I’d go crazy without it.

4. HandBrake

HandBrake is a DVD to MPEG-4 converter that allows you to stick a DVD in your drive and have the video converted to a digital file for convenient viewing. It’s great for minimizing wear-and-tear on DVDs, plus it’s handy if you travel a lot and want to watch movies on your laptop.

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There are plenty of tools available for creating virtual machines and servers in windows. These OS Emulation tools comes handy for testing software without investing in a large and expensive hardware lab. Before researching for this list, I was not aware that there are so many Linux tools available for creating virtual desktops and testing operating systems.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

This VM (virtual machine) application, owned by Sun Microsystems and created by a small company called innotek, is one of the most popular virtualization solutions for Linux.

“It’s the third most popular method to run Windows applications on Linux”, according to DesktopLinux.com (trailing Wine, which is not an emulator/virtualizer, and VMWare, which is proprietary).

There’s good reason: it has a plenty of features, including snapshots, shared folders, RDP, ability to use host USB, and a lot of advanced hardware virtualization. There are two versions of VirtualBox. Installing the open-source edition is easy: just install the virtualbox-ose package  in the universe repositories. If  you want to install the enhanced but closed-source version, you’ll need to visit the Web site(below) and download the binaries from there.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

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A Unix shell or Linux console is a personal account which allows users access to a command prompt on another machine. We mentioned those earlier in our Post about Linux Commands , With these accounts you can login to a remote server and execute commands on it. These accounts are normally accessed via SSH. Historically we used telnet for that but now telnet is fast becoming obsolete due to security concerns. These free shell accounts can be used to practice your Linux / Unix skills as well as making most out of IRC, Email, web hosting etc.

The free Unix shell accounts listed below are all provided by not for profit organizations. The existence of these non-profit organizations is vital for Internet community.So it is not good to bring them down. (you know what I am talking about).

http://freeshell.org , http://sdf-eu.or

Server & services:
- two T3s lines
- SIGs, Music Compilations and Membership activities
- 10+ DEC Alphas (DS20L/DS10L) running NetBSD
- Supporter of the NetBSD project and The Computer History Museum in Mountain View California
- Members vote in new features
- Member contributed programs and tutorials
- 80MB (free), 600MB and 800MB disk quotas
- Membership perks (such as free admission to the Computer History Museum) Read the full story