Version control systems that work on FreeDOS

Since I am into retro, I thought about hobby programming on an old machine that runs FreeDOS. I considered using version control systems, though I don't remember using any about 30 years ago when my main (and only) machine was running MS-DOS. My search led me to the following threads:

• [Freedos-user] Git for DOS?
• [Freedos-user] DOS version control
• Source code control on an MS-DOS system

To conclude: 

• Mercurial can be made to work locally. 
• TLIB is a proprietary version control system still being sold. 
• Free and open-source RCS 5.7 has been patched to work on DOS, another port can be found here. 
• There is also Prism, and 
• CVS DOS binaries can be found on various FTP servers.

Update 2026.10.09

There are CVS binaries, source code and documentation in DJ Delorie's GNU tools archive. I was curious enough to search for CVS hosting option as well. Thanks to wikipedia article Comparison of source-code-hosting facilities, I have discovered that following still support CVS:

• GForge
• GNU Savannah
• Ourproject.org
• SEUL.org

They are all free for free and open-source projects. 

How to update Tiny Core Linux from version 17.0 to 17.1

I am running only the Core base system, so these instructions cover only that.

1. First, run getMirror. This will populate $MIRROR system variable. 
   
   
2. Now, you have to update optional kernel modules, if you have any - I don't:
   cd /etc/sysconfig/tcedir/optional
   for File in *\-6.18.2\-*.tcz*; do wget $MIRROR/${File/\-6.18.2\-/\-6.18.35\-}; done
   
   
3. Download updated vmlinuz and core.gz files from:
   http://www.tinycorelinux.net/17.x/x86/release/distribution_files/
   
   Replace with them existing files in the boot directory. In my case, it is:
   /mnt/sda3/tce/boot
   
   
4. Reboot the system and that's it!

 

Configuring the SSH server on Tiny Core Linux using OpenSSH

1. Create (and persist) a proper user

   The default tc user is passwordless, so you either want to set a password for it or perhaps create a separate user. Creating a user and setting a password is the same as on other Linux distributions. Once you do that, you'll need to persist the changes. Add these lines to the /opt/.filetool.lst:

   etc/passwd
   etc/shadow
   etc/group

2. Install the openSSH package

3. Create the SSHD configuration from the template

   cd /usr/local/etc/ssh/
   sudo cp sshd_config.orig sshd_config

4. Start the SSH daemon

   sudo /usr/local/etc/init.d/openssh start
   
   At this point you should be able to ssh into your machine.

5. Make the SSH configuration persistent

   sudo echo 'usr/local/etc/ssh' >> /opt/.filetool.lst

6. Edit the system startup file

   sudo echo '/usr/local/etc/init.d/openssh start &' >> /opt/bootlocal.sh

7. Backup your configuration files

   backup 

8. Reboot the system 

That should be it!