Just curious why you’re going the VM route, when there’s DOSBox for Linux?
Is there some functionality FreeDOS in a VM gives you that you can’t get from DOSBox?
For me - DOSBox is as simple as :
sudo apt install dosbox
(which I just did now)
Just tried ping, but doesn’t seem like the binary is there… I guess I could copy it from somewhere (I have an archive of DOS boot disk images with utilities on them) to find out if I have a TCP/IP stack… I’m old enough to remember if you wanted TCP on DOS, you had to BUY a TCP/IP stack! Not cheap either, unless you bought them in massive multi-user license deals… Then Novell started giving them away, then Microsoft threw one in (they got most of the code from BSD) with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 “TCP/IP Add On” (free download).