On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 7:50 AM hms--- via Freedos-user <freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Hi there [..] > > I have been using QEMU and FreeDos up to now. There are several > drawbacks compared with dosemu2. Copying a large number of files to the > image and retaining file timestamps is a problem. I achieve this by > first copying to the access drive, then starting FreeDos in QEMU and > then using XCOPY to transfer files to the C: Drive (image). This takes > considerable time. I have had little to no success exporting files. > Writing to the access drive usually crashes QEMU. And finally, FreeDos > under QEMU is slightly slower than dosemu2. The stability of dosemu2 > remains to be seen.
I use QEMU to run FreeDOS on my Linux system, and it is admittedly a bit difficult to get used to because you need to "configure" or "build" the virtual machine using command line options. Here are the commands I use: (1) To create a new virtual disk, such as to install a fresh copy of FreeDOS, I might type this: (I'll make it 20MB for this example because I'm actually typing the commands while I install a new FreeDOS instance .. but change that to 500MB if you want to use a bigger virtual disk) $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 freedos.qcow2 20M You'll see output that looks like this: Formatting 'freedos.qcow2', fmt=qcow2 cluster_size=65536 extended_l2=off compression_type=zlib size=20971520 lazy_refcounts=off refcount_bits=16 (2) To install FreeDOS 1.4 rc3 with the LiveCD, you need to "build" a virtual machine with some memory, and configured with at least the LiveCD and the virtual disk. Don't forget to use KVM or it will be REALLY SLOW: $ qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 32 -cdrom FD14LIVE.iso -hda freedos.qcow2 -boot order=d This configures the virtual machine with 32MB memory, and uses the FreeDOS 1.4 rc3 LiveCD and the virtual hard disk I just made in step 1. The '-boot order=d' tells QEMU to boot only from the CD drive (which is always referred to in the 'order=' option as 'd' .. the first hard disk is always referred to as 'c' .. the first floppy is always referred to as 'a' .. the network is always referred to as 'n'). You can give '-cdrom' and '-hda' in either order. (3) Go through the usual FreeDOS installation process. Because I'm using a small (20MB) virtual disk, I just did the "plain DOS" installation. (4) When the install is finished, use the "Return to DOS" option and type 'shutdown' at the DOS prompt inside FreeDOS to stop the virtual machine. (5) Now that you've installed FreeDOS, anytime you want to run FreeDOS, you start QEMU by booting from the virtual disk. You can optionally configure the machine to use the LiveCD or the BonusCD, so you can use FDIMPLES to install other packages. Here's the command line to use the LiveCD, but boot from the virtual disk: $ qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 32 -hda freedos.qcow2 -cdrom FD14LIVE.iso -boot order=c You can use other options too. For example, to use the Linux local time as your virtual machine time, add the '-rtc' option like this: $ qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 32 -hda freedos.qcow2 -cdrom FD14LIVE.iso -boot order=c -rtc base=localtime You said you don't require sound, so I won't show the options to configure that (it requires a few options to connect everything together) but that's possible too. I emulate a PC speaker, SoundBlaster16, and AdLib. If you need to copy files to (or from) the FreeDOS virtual disk, you should only do this WHEN THE VIRTUAL MACHINE IS NOT RUNNING. Otherwise you will corrupt the virtual disk. I find the easiest way to do this is with the 'guestmount' tool from libguestfs-tools. (If you don't have this by default on your system, you can install it with your Linux package manager.) The 'guestmount' command has a particular command line. First, you "add" a virtual disk to work with, using the '-a' option. Then you need to give a partition in the virtual disk that you want to mount, using the '-m' option. Note that the '-m' option uses "/dev/sda1" notation to mean the first partition in the virtual disk, even though this isn't really your system's /dev/sda1. For a reasonably sized virtual disk like 20MB or 500MB, FreeDOS configures the disk with just one partition. That means if I wanted to exchange files with my freedos.qcow2 disk, I need to "mount" the "/dev/sda1" partition on that virtual disk to a directory (which I'll call 'freedos') like this: $ mkdir freedos $ guestmount -a freedos.qcow2 -m /dev/sda1 freedos This might take a second, so don't panic if it doesn't return right away. Now I can copy files to/from the FreeDOS virtual disk, using a Linux file manager or from the command line. If you want to preserve file timestamps, don't forget to use '-p' (preserve) with the 'cp' command on Linux. I can even edit a new file on the virtual disk using Linux 'ed', because it's just another Linux directory at this point: $ ed freedos/hello.bat freedos/hello.bat: No such file or directory i @ECHO OFF ECHO Hello World! . w 28 q ..but I should probably use 'unix2dos' to convert that to DOS format, because that's a text file that has Linux line endings: $ unix2dos freedos/hello.bat unix2dos: converting file freedos/hello.bat to DOS format... Then unmount the directory, and you can use the virtual disk in QEMU as normal. $ guestunmount freedos And not that it matters, but my HELLO.BAT file works fine after I created it on the FreeDOS virtual disk from Linux: C:\>type hello.bat @ECHO OFF ECHO Hello World! C:\>hello Hello World! _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
