After Installing FreeDOS I tried to get networking up. This is did not work, and I completely trashed the system. Fortunately I had no data on it, so I lost nothing but time. So I reinstalled FreeDOS.

This time I stayed closer to the defaults, except that I increased the system memory to 64MB. I can afford it: My host machine has 32GB. I specified a shared folder on my VM options, but FreeDOS did not recognize it. Following How to Backup VM(s) on VirtualBoxI was able to take a snapshot of the system as a backup.

The installation showed that networking had been installed. I just had to figure out how to use it. I left the network adapter as NAT (last time I had changed it to Bridged Adapter). After some searching I found familiar networking tools in c:\net\mtcp. I was able to ping and ftp to my host machine, so my VM has contact with the outside world and can actually be used. I will add c:\net\mtcp to the path so I don’t have to cd to that directory for networking.

A few notes:

• The VirtualBox Manager has a “shared folder” option for guest machines. This would greatly simplify file transfers, but I have not been able to get FreeDOS to recognize it. So for now I have to use ftp, which is OK.
• To reboot right-click on the arrow in the lower right corner of the DOS window, then choose “insert CTRL-ALT-DEL.” Other special keys and key combinations can also be entered that way. I vaguely remember something like that with VMWare at work some years ago. I need to learn more about VirtualBox commands.
• I still have some issues with using my mouse, though I have been able to work around them so far.
• I used FDIMPLES to install all the application software that comes with FreeDOS 1.3. The amount of disk space needed was still absurdly small by modern standards.