Home

Introduction

Carbon is a new operating system based on FreeDOS, designed to be easy to use. Unlike FreeDOS, Carbon is designed for users with no previous DOS experience.

Carbon is currently in early alpha, and it only boots to the DOS command line after installation. In the future, Carbon will have the following features:

• Full desktop (with multiple desktop enviroments to choose from)
• FAT12/16/32 file system support, with read-only support for NTFS
• Support for CD/DVD drives without configuration
• Support for Win95 long file names

Carbon is the successor to LightDOS, another distribution of FreeDOS.

More info

• Release History

How to compile

Carbon is easy to compile into a bootable .iso file. First, make sure you have the entire repo downloaded. If you are on Windows, just run the compile.bat file. If you are using Linux or Mac, run the compile.sh file. On Linux/Mac you may have to mark it as executable first, with chmod +x ./compile.sh. When it's done, it will create a carbon.iso file within the main folder. Simply burn that image using any tool you like to a CD/DVD, or mount it into a virtual machine to try out Carbon.

Compiling Carbon is only suppored on Windows, Linux (x86 only), and Mac. For any other platform, it will try using the binary at /usr/bin/mkisofs. Pre-compiled Carbon boot discs are also available in the Releases page, if you don't want to/can't compile it yourself.

How the boot disc works

On boot of the .iso image (or whatever media it was burned to), isolinux is loaded. It then mounts the floppy image located at CDROOT/isolinux/BTDISK.IMG. The startup scrips on the floppy image then mount the entire CD partition (the CDROOT folder), sets it to the D:\ drive, and runs the AUTORUN.BAT file within CDROOT.