As you probably know, I am the IT Director and Campus CIO at the University of Minnesota Morris. Over the weekend, Morris hosted a special event to help students learn about free and open source software. In partnership with OpenHatch, the event was titled "Open Source Comes to Campus" and provided an introduction to open source software, including a career panel, and hands-on opportunities to contribute to open source software projects.
During the afternoon workshop, I led several small groups in contributing to their first open source software projects. In my case, we helped out with FreeDOS. During the afternoon, we contributed in two major ways:
With help from Emily, Josh, and Alek, we migrated old web pages into the FreeDOS Wiki. The overall project to convert old content will take weeks or months, and this workshop provided a great kick-off for our documentation clean-up efforts.
Daniel refactored the web code for the FreeDOS News page, which also feeds the news items on the FreeDOS website. Daniel made an immediate and lasting improvement to the FreeDOS website. Behind the scenes, the news code needed to be cleaned up. Daniel's fixes also allow visitors to link directly to a news item, necessary for sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
Other groups provided improvements to a free Senet board game and to a drone control system.
I am proud to have been a mentor for this event. What a great way to help students and to serve the campus! I look forward to next year's event!
Special thanks to Elena Machkasova and others in the Computer Science Club who planned this wonderful event.
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About Me
- Jim Hall
- I'm Jim Hall, the founder and Project Coordinator for the FreeDOS Project. I started FreeDOS in 1994, when I was an undergraduate physics student at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Other developers got in touch with me, and we began work creating our own version of DOS that would be compatible with MS-DOS. I shared the extended DOS utilities that I had written for myself, as did others. We also found public domain or open source programs that replaced other DOS commands. A few months later, we released our first FreeDOS “Alpha” distribution. And from there, FreeDOS grew into what you see today!
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