This page has the basic steps needed to run Ace OS in real PC or in an Emulator. These steps are very simple for advanced programmers but it will be slightly difficult for others who don't know grub and emulators.

You can install Ace OS in your real system or on any virtual machines emulated by an emulator such as BOCHS, VMWARE or VirtualPC. Whatever the option you need GRUB. GNU GRUB is a Multiboot boot loader. It was derived from GRUB, GRand Unified Bootloader. GRUB used to load the kernel and other executive modules. You can download GNU GRUB from http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ Since most Linux distributions contain GRUB it is easy to install Ace on a Linux based system. If you are using a Windows based system then you should obtain WinGRUB from the following site http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/. Installing Ace OS in a bare system (unformatted) is not possible since I have not created an installer for Ace OS. However you can install Ace OS on a formatted floppy disk without any problem.

Follow the following steps to install Ace on your system

Download and install GRUB
If you are using Linux you may already have GRUB on your system. If you are using Windows download GRUB from the GRUB website. The installation of GRUB is tedious on a Windows system because you have to create a boot disk from the given files and then install it in the hard disk(You can get the detailed instructions from the GRUB online documentation). To avoid this complicated installation procedure for original GRUB; you can download and install WinGRUB instead. It has its own windows based setup so you can easily install it. After running the setup run the WinGRUB GUI from the Start Menu->Programs. From Tools menu select Install to install GRUB into your hard disk select BOOT.ini and select C drive as system drive.

Copy Ace Kernel
To boot Ace OS you have to copy the Ace OS kernel (Kernel.sys). Copy the kernel.sys file from the Ace OS binary to one of your hard disk folder. You have to know the hard disk number and partition number where you have just copied the kernel.sys. Although there are ways to find harddisk number and partition number I assume you have only one hard disk and you have copied the kernel.sys to the root folder of the first partition. (The partition should be recognized by GRUB, check GRUB manual for the list of partition types that it will recognize)

Configure GRUB
After installing a GRUB in your machine you have to configure it to load Ace Kernel. To do so edit the menu.lst file in the GRUB installation directory and include the following lines to it. If you have installed WinGRUB you can find the menu.lst file in the C:\GRUB directory.

root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel.sys
boot

Be careful about the casing of letters and also about the spaces. If you have copied kernel.sys to anyother location other than the root folder of first partition of the first harddisk then you have to modify hd0,0 to hd <harddisk number>,<partition number> and /kernel.sys to /<folder>/kernel.sys.

Floppy Images
If you don't want to install Ace OS in your hard disk then you can boot it in BOCHS using the following Floppy image and bochs script file. Further you can extract the floppy image file into a floppy using WinImage and boot a real machine.
Ace OS With GRUB installed boot floppy - Zipped - ~150KB

Bochs configuration file - Text - ~2KB Right click and save this file