Following with my recent explorations around running vintage operating systems on various virtualization platforms, I’ve recently tried to run FreeDOS on QEMU, and these are the steps I followed. Sources: Wikibooks and QEMU QED.
- Install QEMU:
sudo dnf install qemu
- Download FreeDOS:
wget https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.3/official/FD13-LiveCD.zip
- Extract the
FD13LIVE.iso
file from the downloaded distribution using the command:unzip FD13-LiveCD.zip
- Create a disk image for FreeDOS:
qemu-img create -f raw freedos.img 5G
- Start the installation process:
qemu-system-i386 -drive file=freedos.img -m 16 -vga cirrus -net nic,model=pcnet -cdrom FD13LIVE.iso -boot d
- Launch FreeDOS on QEMU:
qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 32 -hda dos.vmdk -cdrom FD13LIVE.iso -boot order=c
- Finally, use
FDIMPLES
to install more FreeDOS software.
All of this works, but to be honest, it’s very slow, much slower than on VirtualBox, for example.