Seem impossible to me because Linux has always been a real 32 bit OS and dosbox is designed to boot 16 bit OSs. Windows 95 for example is a "16 bit dos system" which makes use of something like a permanent 32 bit extender (ok, this is really a layman's guess).

not possible in dosbox 0.72

<conspiracy mode="on">
Since Qbix explicit mentions 0.72 I suspect it will be possible in later versions 😀
</conspiracy>

Nope.

ok thanks

It shouldn't be too hard to make a little stripped-down 16-bit Linux build in flat binary that *should* execute in DOSBox, but I don't know very much about Linux or machine/assembly language, so maybe I'm wrong. At any rate, such a thing could be incredibly useful. OK, DOSBox isn't designed for stuff like that, but you get the idea: you got Linux in my Windows! hey, this is delicious! now I can ls and cp and man and mv all day long and still get a BSOD when I'm done, or even before I'm done! 😵 😉

There's already linux for 8086, 286:
http://elks.sourceforge.net/introduction.html
http://www.uclinux.org/index.html
http://www.debath.co.uk/

Uhm it's not about the processor, but anyways.

so maybe I'm wrong

Yeah!

Running anything except DOS (which includes old Windowses by definition) first fails because of non-emulated disk hardware.

By the time someone implements an IDE emulation that no game ever needs, you'd hit CPU inaccuracies (often delliberate ones, to improve game speed). And then you'd probably missing more hardware which isn't needed for game-only emulation. And if you were a master programmer who solved all these issues, you'd realize that using qemu/VirtualBox for the same task would have been much less painful and would work better.

The net result is what everyone is saying all the time: Don't run anything but games in it. If anything else works, it's pure luck (and unsupported). This specialization makes games a truly great experience in DOSBox, but many other things a pain.

my main goal was to run linux on my psp and someone ported dosbox to the psp i already run win3.11 and win95 on it just wanted to know if it was possible to run linux

why not just have linux for psp instead

Using bochs to run Linux
http://www.hacker.co.il/psp/bochs/
(a bit limited due to the lack of a keyboard for the PSP)

Running a custom version of linux
http://jacksonm80.googlepages.com/linuxonpsp.htm
(no idea how idea how robust it is)

Actually, now that I think about it, it really should be possible if you make it so that you can exit from it and use the existing file system (and there are Linuxes [Linuces?] that use FAT-12, FAT-16, FAT-32, and possibly NTFS) and the interrupts emulated by DOSBox, and no other hardware dependencies. But yeah, it wouldn't be very useful. I'm going to check out this VirtualBox. Is it associated with DOSBox at all?

Emulating a disk controller isn't required, Linux will run out of a ramdrive/rom.

Oh hell stop this useless talking.