LightDOS Wiki

You probably think LightDOS is dead, since it hasn't been updated in almost a year. Well, you're right. Even though I never got around to making an installer for it (or many other things), LightDOS is officially dead and will not be updated in the future. The download links haven't been working in about a month, since I forgot to re-upload them when I remade my personal website.

But LightDOS still has an active following, despite my neglect to update it. SourceForge has created a mirror of it, and they have tracked hundreds of downloads. I decided to make a new operating system as a successor to LightDOS - and it's called Carbon.

Carbon is basically what LightDOS was going to be - a distribution of FreeDOS with a built-in desktop. Everything LightDOS has right now, Carbon will have sometime in the future. Right now, all it does is boot to the FreeDOS command line. So what's the difference?

The difference is that it's available as a bootable CD from the start. The bootable disc, like most Linux CDs, will work as an install disc and a live version of Carbon OS. The cool part is that you can customize Carbon for whatever you want, run the compiler, and you have a shiny new .iso file ready for burning. The compiler currently works with Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Carbon is also designed to be customizable, expandable, and more open. You can fork the Carbon repo on GitHub, make a few changes, and make it your own. Or maybe add a few tweaks for your machine, or submit fixes into the main repo. As time goes on, more and more features will be added to Carbon (including many that never made it to LightDOS).

So while LightDOS is dead, Carbon will be even better than LightDOS ever was. Until Carbon is on-par with LightDOS Prerelease 4's features, I will leave the download links and FAQ here.

I hope you're excited as I am about Carbon, because it's going to be freaking awesome.