maybe ot: dosemu question

[Gene Collins]

Hello all.  You don't have to use the free DOS that comes with dosemu. 
If you have DOS or Windows 95/98 installed on another partition, you can
point dosemu at it in your /etc/dos/conf file.  You don't want to point
to the raw partition however.  What you want to do is mount the
partition, and create a symbolic link to the mount point in
/var/lib/dosemu.  Then refer to the symbolic link in your /etc/dos/conf
file.  Dosemu will happily boot whatever version of DOS it finds in the
linked subdirectory.  You should still point to the original Free DOS
image as a second drive for dosemu, since it contains some special
dosemu commands, including the exitemu command, which you'll need to
gracefully shutdown dosemu.  Other things you'll find of interest are a
special mouse driver, and a special cdrom driver that will work with
mscdex, just like the standard DOS cdrom drivers do.  If you intend to
run the DOS part of Windows 95/98, be sure to edit your MSDOS.SYS file,
and change the bootgui=1 to bootgui=0, so that you will boot without
attempting to start the Windows part of the system.  DOSEMU does * NOT *
support this.  When you boot outtside of linux, you'll have to type win,
just like you did for Windows 3.1.  The other thing you should be aware
of is that dosemu has its own built in himem and emm386 memory managers,
so the ones provided by Microsoft aren't necessary, and won't work.  It
is possible to change the extentions that dosemu will look for in the
/etc/dos/conf file for autoexec.bat and config.sys.  I changed these to
.emu, and made copies of autoexec.bat and config.sys, calling them
autoexec.emu and config.emu.  I then customized these .emu files for
dosemu, and left my standard autoexec.bat and config.sys files
untouched, for normal booting outtside of Linux.  You really need to
read the docs to pick up a lot of this information, but be warned, the
docs aren't the easiest reading in the world.  But perhaps these tips
will give you some ideas.

One other thing I should mention is that the /etc/dos/conf file contains
parameters for specifying how much of extended and protected memory you
want to make available to DOS.  Don't be greedy and allocate all your
extended, expanded and protected memory to DOS, or you'll find yourself
in trouble.  Leave Linux at least 16 meg for its own use.  The cool
thing is that after you get things properly configured, you will be able
to run DOS on a virtual console, just like any other Linux application. 
The difference is that you'll have to use control-alt-<function-key> to
get out of the dosemu session and on to another console.  The comments
in /etc/dos/conf are your friend.  Read them carefully.  Make a backup
copy of the file before you start editing.  You'll save yourself a lot
of grieff!

Gene

>Sorry,
>Please ignore.
>I didn't realize that mscdex.exe and
>the other commands I tryed didn't come with dosemu/freedos.
>Even so, I can't imagine why typing theese commmands
>would give me insufficient memory errors
>instead just saying bad command or filename, or something 
>like that.
>Greg
>
>
>On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 09:05:43PM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I know this maybe off topic.
>> I'm trying to run a few programs under dosemu
>> (one of them being mscdex), and keep getting a 
>> insufficient memory message. What can I do to increase
>> the amount of memory alocated to dosemu,
>> or how else might I fix this problem?
>> Thanks in advance for any help.
>> Greg
>> 
>> 
>> 
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