Re: Dosemu

I have BSD, Caldera, Corel, Debian, Mandrake, Redhat, Slackware, Suse & 
even an oddball like Storm Linux CDs. Most of them dont even include 
dosemu.

BSD, characteristic of its notorious wisdom, said right at the beginning 
of the install, to use fdisk to make a dos partition. I have a dozen 
drives sitting around on my desktop with some of these Linux distros, as 
well as dos and os2. I run with the hood off, so if I need dos for 
something, I tell it to boot off the dos drive, or use bootthru on a floppy.

I distinctly recall asking Redhat 8 to include DOSEMU during the 
install, but I dont see it on the gui desktop anywhere. I dunno what 
they did with it. Other times, I've downloaded a DOSEMU.tar.gz but 
during the install, it crashes saying I lack a dependancy.  One of the 
chronic problems with Linux. With dos, the number of critical files like 
EMM386, DPMI, or whatever is small enuf that the ordinary user can get a 
handle on it.

But I think BSD's idea is a much better way to go. The thing I use dos 
for quite often, and no doubt many techies as well, is to boot the 
system to check out the performance of some peripheral, totally separate 
from the 'dependancy' or other software problems of the gui os. If you 
havta be changing hardware, its nice to have an os that boots in a few 
seconds. But it would also be nice if Linux, like some early versions of 
windoz, gave the user quick and easy access to the dos prompt, even 
offering to reboot in dos.

I wonder as well, if linux is not smart enuf to figure out how to hide 
iteself in some of the typically hundreds of megs of dram that platforms 
have nowadays, and let dos boot from just the first 640 of the first 8 
meg. I dunno what dos would do with more than 32megs of dram.

Since the distros are continually evolving and adopting new wrinkles, 
and therefore new bugs, it might be a better idea to have some simpler 
solution like a quick and easy to get to FREEDOS partition.

Another thing that will see increasing use, is when XP crashes, before 
re-installing, to use the dos partition to copy critical personal files 
and folders, to maybe burn them on a cd, and then have the backups 
available after the new XP install.