The following is an issue regarding the mouse and VGA (some how)
that I had while trying to setup FreeDOS on a newer laptop. I asked 
https://reddit.com/r/dosgaming, but ended up finding my own solution. 
This issue comes up about once a year or so on /r/dosgaming and I'm 
tired of having to spend 30 minutes hunting links to old posts, so here
you go...

----------[Original posting on https://reddit.com/r/dosgaming]----------

FreeDOS software errors involving mouse and VGA on 2008 Acer netbook

Games and graphic editor programs that require VGA and a mouse will not 
run on my 2008 laptop/netbook. I have tried running ctmouse and changing
the REM DISPLAY settings in the AUTOEXEC file, but it doesn't help. Has 
anyone gotten FreeDOS to properly run on a newer computer? I'm guessing 
there's a MOUSE.COM file I'm missing, but I haven't got a clue where to 
look. Please no DOSBox suggestions. I'm well aware, but that's not the 
point.

SOLVED:

    dir mouse.com /s

    Pick one of the results and add to AUTOEXEC.BAT as "LH=C:\PATH\TO\MOUSE.COM"

    dir mouse.sys /s

    Pick one of the results and add to FDCONFIG.SYS as "DEVICE=C:\PATH\TO\MOUSE.SYS"

In my case, I used MOUSE.COM from Visual Basic for DOS v1.00 and MOUSE.SYS
from MS WORD 5.5. Even the touch to click works on my trackpad. Make sure
to reboot. I picked the VBDOS version for MOUSE.COM because it was the 
largest version of that file, so I figured it would have the most bang 
per byte. It also seems to have fixed a lot of program's display issues.
But, I also changed the EGA code numbers in DISPLAY="..." inside of 
AUTOEXEC.BAT to 437 (US) instead of the default 8xx one (can't remember 
the number).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

2021/01/18 Edit: The EGA mode number was 858 before changing it to 437.