FreeDOS will run on actual Hardware, Virtual Machines, and even Modern Hardware, though each one has it's own caveats.

On actual Vintage Hardware, you will need the Legacy Boot CD or Floppy Distribution to install depending on the vintage of your computer. Most computers from the 386 on back will require the Floppy Distribution, while a 386 or better with a Dynamic Drive Overlay on a large Hard Disk - such as OnTrack 9 - can leverage this feature to boot off of the LEGACY CD media to install (the latter is how I do this on my own computers). Some of your more esoteric Vintage PC's might be more problematic though, so may want to consider heavily before installing FreeDOS on them (mostly stuff that stands outside Standard such as: Pre-Compaq (1982) IBM Compatibles, The IBM PC Jr. and Tandy 1000 (special hardware differences), AT&T/Olivetti PCs, and some other non-standard, non-IBM oddballs out there).

On Modern Hardware - bare metal - you can install FreeDOS using a USB Distribution including a LiveUSB that allows you to use it without installing it, and a USB Distribution that will install to your modern PC's hard disk. For FreeDOS, Modern is defined as anything post Pentium II pretty much. It will run on these systems, but the caveat is you might need some more modern specialized utilities to get the best experience, such as the SoundBlaster Driver Utilites found on the VOGONS Forum to ustilize a modern sound card like a vintage SoundBlaster card.

And lastly you can use VirtualBox, or any other Virtual Machine Software, and run FreeDOS in that sort of environment, allowing you to concurrently use it with your modern Linux/MacOS/Windows Operating system without rebooting. This is a very popular option these days to save space, time, and money.

That said, using legacy computers, you might run into problems with some more esoteric systems such as the Tandy 1000, Olivetti/AT&T PC 6300, possibly some WYSE/Amdek systems, or anything that's quite a bit "off" from the standard. For these systems, we suggest using the version of DOS they came with, or MS-DOS 6.22. Mostly this covers older (286 and older) syystems moreso than stuff from the 386SX/DX on up.

VirtualBOX
This is how most people seem to be using FreeDOS these days. Virtual Machines are the easiest install, and they get networking out of the box (as opposed to hardware networking which requires a bit more fiddling around to get working - well, except what I show you to do here, which simplifies things).

1. Download the Live CD ISO from the FreeDOS website.
2. Open VirtualBox and create a new Virtual Machine, I'm going to be making a VirtualBox page to go through this process, the defaults work
3. (optional) to streamline the process, highlight the virtual machine, select "settings" and insert the FreeDOS Live CD ISO into the virtual optical drive
4. Close settings and start the vIrtual Machine to start the install process
5. Follow the prompts to install FreeDOS using the installer that loads, you may have to reboot before running the installer as it will partition and format the virtual hard disk you have created when creating the FreeDOS virtual machine
6. Once completed, we will talk about more universal setup steps, though there shouldn't be many for VMs

Vintage PC (8088-286/early 80386)
This would apply to all IBM PC/XT/AT (ie 8088-80286) machines, all laptops and desktops that lack a CD-ROM drive, and pretty much anything else without a proper ability to boot off a CD-ROM Drive, which may include some early cD-ROM standards such as SOny and Mitsumi.

1. Download the FLoppy Images from the FreeDOS website.
2. Using the PC of your choice, create install media Floppies - you can use a modern machine, or a vintage machine, or even use mTCP FTP to FTP the image files to the vintage PC And then generate them on THAT old computer using whatever DOS is already installed on it

386-P4 era PC (Floppy Boot)
This is for installing on either your bog-standard 386/486 or later PC with a CD-ROM drive and no ability to boot from it - ie, some old 486 you found with the stock IDE CD-ROM installed and no DDO to bypass the BIOS INT13H loader like in the steps below.

1. Download the Legacy CD, Legacy Boot Floppy, and (optional) Bonus CD images from the FreeDOS website.

386-P4 era PC (CD-ROM Boot)
This is the method I use (assuming UDVD doesn't mess things up), where you are using a 386 or newer PC with a large har disk and a dynamic drive overlay program on the hard disk/SSD in use. This is the "Default" way.

386-P4 era PC (Alternate Setup Method)
THis is for when you get a "hanging" during the installation process while it tries to detect your PC configuration. I've seen this happen with CN486 because it uses a VERY Weird SSD/SATA-to-IDE/Super I/O/DVD-RW drive setup on it (basically, mid 90's VLB controller hosting insane-speed data storage well beyond it's years in youth using newer technologies not recognized by the controller such as SATA or ATA/133). This is a "text/prompt only" setup process kicked off by starting the install off a HDD using the setup batch file for kick-off.

Modern PC (NOTE: REQUIRES LEGACY BOOT AND/OR CSM BOOT OPTION)
This is for those of you crazy enough, or desparate enough to use a modern PC with FreeDOS, lol, j/k. THis is basically for those who want to install FreeDOS on a modern PC and make use of it. By Modern, I mean anything made in 2008 or later that has an EFI/UEFI compatible BIOS, but still has Legacy Boot (a lot of modern PCs post-2020 don't even have the Legacy Boot feature anymore). Keep in mind also, that this won't be utilizing the full capacity of your hardware because most of these are 64-bit, multi-core, hyperthreaded PCs, and not a single core, 32-bit, PC intended to run DOS like those 30+ years old (1995) or older.

Drivers
While FreeDOS is like a "modern" experience using the classic DOS approach, it isn't 100% free of the legacy shackles of a stripped down, bare bones, single user, single-tasking Operating System like this. You still will have to manually install some drivers, especially if your PC is a vintage one like most of mine are (ie legacy or reproduction hardware). So this will go over the stuff you may want to, and might not want to install from a hardware and FreeDOS perspective.

Networking
By now, if you're running on bare metal hardware, you've probably noticed a message pop-up that "FreeDOS Does not support connecting to a network using hardware at this time" - this is because they don't "Support" it, but it does not mean it "can't do it". Support is a word thrown around in the I.T. industry to discourage non-technical people from making technical decisions they don't have the foggiest clue about making a technical decision about. Networking on bare metal in DOS is one of those technical things. Because you will need to setup a packet driver for your Ethernet Card (or your WiFi Adapter - assuming a DOS version is availiable, which most likely not unless you are using a card Orinoco chipset, or an AVec chipset card like the CIsco Aironet series). Then after that, is configuring mTCP to work with said card, setting the hostname, MTU, your IRC/FTP/WEBSERVER settings, and then using DHCP to automatically reslolve an IPv4 IP Address once the packet driver is loaded (usually to hardware vector 0x60), and then you have to worry about Lease Time as well.

Other Packages/Software