help with dosemu; getting very frustrated

Thu Mar 21 11:27:14 EST 2002

Hi Cheryl,

I am going to paste the two emails that I happened to save from a previous
post on the dosemu subject. They were written by Gene Collins in an attempt
to clear up some issues with dosemu. Gotta give credit where credit is due,
he writes really well. Anyway, hope this helps.

Hi Greg.  No, you didn't find anything new, but it is kind of cool.  The
problem comes when you do things that scroll the screen or that require
direct access to video memory.  Speakup won't do as well with programs
that need direct video access, and will repeat a lot of information for
programs that need to scroll the screen.  It takes a bit of fiddling,
but it is possible to get your DOS screen reader to run along side of
speakup.  If you are running the latest cvs version of Speakup, it may
be possible to point one of the DOS com devices at /dev/synthe, and have
your DOS screen reader work that way.  If not, then you have to edit the
synthesizwr file in the Speakup directory for your synth and comment out
the code that registers the serial port with the kernel.  This will let
you share the serial port between the kernel and your dosemu session. 
If it works, great!  If not, you get to keep all the pieces.  You should
turn speakup off on the console you intend to run dosemu on before
starting it with your DOS screen reader, otherwise you'll get double
speech.  When running a DOS screen reader, I've found the -c (direct
console) and -k (raw keyboard) flags to be helpful.  You also have to
edit your /etc/dos/conf file to point the com devices at the correct
/dev/ttyS devices.  Hope this helps.

Gene

>Hi All,
>
>I just installed dosemu.
>Leaving speakup running to see what happens, I proceded to run it as I
prepare
d to look for my floppy with provox7 on it.
>To my surprise and delight, speakup spoke everything right up until the c
prom
pt.
>It continued speaking as I listed the directory
>and did various other things until typing exitemu, and going back to the
>bash prompt. Is this something that's known (speakup works under dosemu
withou
t the need for a dos screen reader),
>or did I accidentally stumble across something new here?
>Greg

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
>> 
>> 

Keith Watson
Sypris Electronics
Email:  Keith.Watson at sypris.com <mailto:Keith.Watson at sypris.com> 
Phone: (813) 972-6270
Fax #:  (813) 972-6842

-----Original Message-----
From: Cheryl Homiak [mailto:chomiak at chartermi.net]
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 2:57 PM
To: speakup
Subject: help with dosemu; getting very frustrated

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.

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