How to install DOSBox-Staging?

Legacy Installer

Mar 8, 2023 • 2 min read

DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices. It is meant as a (mostly) drop-in replacement for older DOSBox versions.

Installing

Linux

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If you have not already installed a Linux distribution, see our tutorials on how to install Kubuntu, a beginner-friendly distro.

On most Linux distributions, you will want to install DOSBox-Staging from Flathub. First, you need to enable Flatpak and Flathub support on your distribution. See this page to know how to do so. If you are following VirtualHub Setup tutorials from the beginning, we covered enabling Flatpak and Flathub support in Kubuntu in the post titled "What to do after installing Kubuntu?".

After you have enabled Flathub support, you can run the following command to install DOSBox-Staging:

flatpak install flathub io.github.dosbox-staging

To run DOSBox-Staging, we need to run the following command:

flatpak run io.github.dosbox-staging

Let's make it simpler to use. If you are using Bash (the default shell on most Linux distros) or are not sure which shell you are using, run:

nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following line to the end of the file:

alias dosbox-staging="flatpak run io.github.dosbox-staging"

And then press Ctrl+Alt+O to save the file and Ctrl+Alt+X to exit nano.

Now close your terminal and open it again. Now you can simply run dosbox-staging to start it.

If you don't like flathub for any reason, you can also install DOSBox-Staging using classical packages. See this page to learn how to do so.

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If you install DOSBox-Staging using classical packages, it will replace DOSBox and the executable will be called dosbox, not dosbox-staging. So, modify the tutorials accordingly.

Windows

You can also install DOSBox-Staging on Windows. See this page to learn how to do so. Basically, download the installer (Local Copy) and complete all the steps.

Documentation

You can read the official DOSBox-Staging manual here. There is more information on the DOSBox-Staging wiki.

Credits

DOSBox-Staging is an open source software made possible by its awesome developers. You can visit its website to know more.

Video tutorial

Do you want to follow the tutorial by watching a video? We will post a video on our youtube channel soon.

Archives of this tutorial are available on Wayback Machine.

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