Emulating DOS in Linux

But why do i need DOS? To run old programs and to remember the good old days.

Dosbox

Dosbox is a DOS Emulator (it does not emulate a PC). Dosbox is easy to install, user friendly (easy to instal and use), you can easily mount any folder from the Box), but really slow. A 1.7 Ghz machine would emulate a 25 Mhz 386 PC (and the protected mode support is somewhat limited).

Bochs

URL: http://bochs.sourceforge.net

This is a PC emulator that can emulate any PC operating system, including DOS. To install DOS, you must have an image file to be emulated as a disk, then you can install DOS to it (FreeDOS is a very good DOS clone). Bochs works faster than Dosbox, but needs more time to setup.

If you are not very patient at creating image and installing DOS, an image file exists that contains FreeDOS instalation. To move files between DOS inside Bochs and your OS you will need mtools

Qemu

Qemu is another emulator that emulates PC (and many other non PC system), that works even faster than Bochs. You will need to create an image file and install DOS to it as in bochs. Qemu has a kernel module that allows virtualisation to speed up the emulation (although you may not need this for old DOS application)