help with dosemu; getting very frustrated

[Cheryl Homiak]

I've tried this on two other lists so far and nobody seems to have answers for
me; hope somebody here can help. As I have it at least partly up and running,
I'd especially like input from anybody who got their serial ports to work.

First of all, let me clarify that I'm not running under X since I'm blind.
I have made several attempts over the last few months to get dosemu up and
running and, despite having read the accompanying docs ad infinitum ad nauseum I
am still confused. If somebody could help me with this, even offlist if I'm
sounding too beginnerish, I would really appreciate it.
I don't want to use freedos; I want to use the dos-6.22 partition that i have on
/dev/hda2.
I've tried doing this several ways; my most recent, which I realize isn't
totally accurate, was to put '/dev/hda2" under the hdimage entry in the
dosemu.conf. This actually did get me some results as I was able to run wp5.1
with this setup, but it had other problems. For one thing, this apparently
bypassed the commands in /usr/lib/dosemu so I couldn't exit,  not having access
to
the exitemu command. Of course, one could copy those commands to /dev/hda2 ( I
did)
(/dos when mounted) but that made me wonder if I was also bypassing other
important things by this setup. I'm also confused by the link to
/var/lib/dosemu which contains freedos. Do I still want this stuff in
/var/lib/dosemu to be there since i'm not using freedos. Also there's an
autoexec.bat in the /var/lib/dosemu/freedos directory, but most of the commands
there seem to relate to freedos. Are there any commands from that autoexec.bat
that I need or extra ones that i need to put into my autoexec.bat in /dev/had2
to have this run correctly?
My second problem, which may or may not be caused simply by the fact that I
don't have this set up correctly, is that I can't get my com ports to work. I do
have the appropriate /dev indications in my /etc/dosemu.conf in the com lines,
and if i try to copy something to   the versabraille I have on com2, I'm
told the file was copied but com2, with my versabraille, is never actually
being accessed. I know the actual connection works, because I can do this either
from linux (to /dev/ttyS1) or DOS (to com2).
This is getting me totally frustrated and obviously just reading
the docs again isn't going to help me if I'm not understanding some key points.
Help would be appreciated.
TIA.