re: Re: Dosemu

Hi, I disagree. Most Linux distributions nowadays adhere to common standards
what files should bee where... For me, xdosemu is a shell wrapper with the
options -dumb -home and -install possible...

BPATH_FILE=~/.dosemu/bindist_path
FDPART_CHECK_FILE=freedos/dosemu/lcd.exe
test -f conf/dosemurc && HAVECONF=1
test -x bin/dosemu.bin && HAVEBIN=1
test -n "$HAVECONF" -a -n "$HAVEBIN" && HAVEDOSEMUPART=1
test -f $BPATH_FILE && PATHSAVED=1;

...


You can both install system-wide and locally. Not much configuration  was
needed: I only had to load the screen font that xdosemu uses, which I can
do as a local user. It is the vga.pcf.gz font. I also had to edit the file
"~/.dosemu/bindist_path" to make it point to where Dosemu is installed.
In my case, ~/dosemu ... which has a subdirectory conf that contains the
dosemu.conf (for tuning), global.conf (do not edit) and optionally is a
nice place for diskimages. 
Every filename or redirector that you mention in dosemu.conf is interpreted
as relative to ~/dosemu (in my case, of course. Actually it is interpreted
as relative to the bindist path).

Dosemu is just too, well, DOS. Distributions like SuSE and Mandrake are
already starting to define Wine as "the application that opens .exe", so
you can simply click them, but DOS is a bit legacy. By the way, Wine even
comes with a nice graphical installer that autodetects lots of things.

Whatever. I downloaded the Dosemu binary, and it installed well locally in
my home directory. I remember that the 1.1.x version did not compile well,
so I am glad there is a binary version. The dosemu.bin main file (1.6M) is
not even statically linked. It just runs, no further libraries needed
generally speaking. You should have X and Linux, though :-). Similar things
hold for Bochs (also 1 1/2M statically linked binary).

> 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.

True and not true. Dosemu currently gives apps that want "all 4GB of
address space" 3GB and pretends to have given them 4GB. Obviously, this
is just for coolness for the DOS protected mode programs. Got rid of
segment fiddling once and for all. However, they never NEED that much
of RAM. The problem is that some DOS programs insist on getting control
over the memory management and other lowlevel things of the CPU. If Linux
were to hand over that much of control, security would be completely void.
I know, ROOT could probably be given permissions to run "full DOS", but
a DOS program that gets FULL control over the CPU will probably not give
a damn whether Linux continues to run or freezes while the DOS program is
running... So in short: Do not do it. Give DOS some v86 cage with nice
DPMI options for protected mode, and it will be happy most of the time.
When it is not, use your superfast hardware to simulate a reasonably fast
processor completely.

> 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.

FreeDOS is definitely the easier way to run DOS software as compared with
installing Linux just for the sake of running FreeDOS inside it. However,
I love the ability to have several Dosemu windows open at the same time,
use the external debugger, process Dos files with powerful Linux tools, ...
So I personally only boot DOS when I want to single-task my attention onto
one especially nice DOS program :-). Or when a DOS program does not run
in Dosemu.

> 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.

I thought XP and 2k would use NTFS5 as filesystem? I think booting DOS will
not help you much here (well, cool enough that the FAT32 filesystem of
Win9x is supported by FreeDOS).

Eric