It turn out that using kvm was giving me the illusion of using kvm... but I missed the warning saying that kvm was not loaded, and that it was falling back on tcg .... don't know really what it is. The reason was that "Intel virtualization technology" option in "BIOS" was disabled. After enabling it, now qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm works... I hope for real. So qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm make it more obvious that you need to fix something than by using kvm.
Also... it seems that setup need the cdrom (dvd) to be working... as it seems to install from it. My guess was that because I was using -machine pc-i440fx-4.2 I was forcing the use of cdrom... Somehow, the cdrom drive was empty, but setup was finding the emulated hard disk containing the content of the cdrom... and used that instead of the cdrom... at least this is my hypothesis why it worked, and not anymore now that I don't use -macine. So now I come back to use https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/FDT2404-LiveCD.zip instead of https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/FDT2404-FullUSB.zip I installed with (admittedly more complex than needed): qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 32 -cpu 486 -device ide-hd,drive=myhd,bootindex=2 -drive file=2404.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=none,id=myhd,media=disk -device ide-cd,drive=mydvd,bootindex=1 -drive file=T2404LIVE.iso,format=raw,id=mydvd,if=none,media=cdrom And as this use a menu to choose what to boot with, there is no real need to exchange bootindex values. But to have sound and networking, I just used (added previous message parameters to previous line): qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm -m 32 -cpu 486 -device ide-hd,drive=myhd,bootindex=2 -drive file=2404.qcow2,format=qcow2,if=none,id=myhd,media=disk -device ide-cd,drive=mydvd,bootindex=1 -drive file=T2404LIVE.iso,format=raw,id=mydvd,if=none,media=cdrom -audiodev pa,id=mysnd -device sb16,audiodev=mysnd -device adlib,audiodev=mysnd -machine pcspk-audiodev=mysnd -vga cirrus -display sdl -net nic,model=pcnet -net user You can get control back from emulated machine with Ctrl-Alt-G (as shown in upper window) and allows you to close the window. Hope it can help someone while not confusing too many! _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user