FreeDOS networking in QEMU and VirtualBox

Today I tried connecting a FreeDOS virtual machine to the Internet using both QEMU (with the virt-manager frontend) and VirtualBox.

Now, to avoid the XY Problem, I’ll tell you my evil plan: I want to browse the web using Arachne inside FreeDOS running on top of QEMU or VirtualBox (but I’d avoid it), inside Xubuntu.

Now, I installed almost all FreeDOS disksets, I configured Crynwr with the NE2k driver for QEMU (and the PCnet (?) driver for VirtualBox) and I configured both WatTCP and Arachne with BOOTP/DHCP. The result? Failure, of course.

Now, I think I’ll try running QEMU manually on my disk image and pray it works. I’ll post back if it does.