==================================================== The DOSEMU/FreeDos ready-to-use binary distribution. ==================================================== INSTALL ------- An easy way to get DOSEMU working on your machine is to use the ready-to-use DOSEMU binary distribution. This one comes in 2 packages from www.dosemu.org: - dosemu-freedos--bin.tgz A tarball containing a collection of suitable FreeDos binaries, eventually patched to fit DOSEMU needs, together with some GNU tools you may find useful. - dosemu--bin.tgz A tarball containing the recent DOSEMU binaries together with a user local configuration setup. This installation fits into any user HOME directory and can be used and installed without root permissions. You have to unpack _both_ tarballs (as a normal user, NOT as root) into the same directory (regardless what ever) within your HOME, such as: $ mkdir mydos $ cd mydos $ tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz $ tar -zxf dosemu--bin.tgz $ cd dosemu now look where you are and what was installed: $ pwd /home/joeuser/mydos/dosemu $ ls README.bindist bin dosemu xdosemu Xfonts conf freedos RUN --- After you get the install right, you can execute DOSEMU with $ cd ~mydos/dosemu # (your CWD _must_ be here) $ ./dosemu If you have never used DOSEMU before, DOSEMU will boot, and present you with a welcome screen and a command prompt. If for some reason it does not start, look at ~/.dosemu/boot.log for details. Remember, that you can't use -C _within_ DOS to exit _from_ DOS. For this you need to execute 'exitemu' or, when using the 'DOS in a BOX' . Your DOS drives are set up as follows: A: floppy drive (if it exists) C: points to the Linux directory ~/.dosemu/drive_c. It contains the files config.sys, autoexec.bat and a directory for temporary files. It is available for general DOS use. D: points to your Linux home directory E: points to your CD-ROM drive, if it is mounted at /media/cdrom Z: points to the read-only DOSEMU and FreeDOS commands directory It actually points to ~/mydos/dosemu/drive_z; it appears read-only inside DOSEMU. Enter HELP for more information on DOS and DOSEMU commands. Other useful keys are: toggle fullscreen mode in X grab the keyboard in X grab the mouse in X reboot <^> use special keys on terminals (dosemu -t) For DOS applications which only read/write from/to STDIN/STDOUT, you may prefer to invoke DOSEMU such as $ ./dosemu -dumb this has the advantage that (A) the output of the DOS application stacks up in your xterm scroll buffer and (B) you can redirect it to a file such as $ ./dosemu -dumb dir > listing Note that that editing is often restricted to BACKSPACE'ing. SOURCES ------- The sources of all the included binaries can be found in the dosemu-freedos*sources.tgz tarball. CONFIGURATION ------------- Optional configuration is possible by editing the file conf/dosemurc and copying it to ~/.dosemurc. Advanced configuration can be accomplished using global.conf in combination with the -F option. Note that, unlike the situation in installations from source, distributors, and the RPM, /etc/dosemu.conf and /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf are NOT used in this setup, unless you make dosemu.bin suid-root, use sudo or replace IGNORE_DOSEMU_CONF="-n" by IGNORE_DOSEMU_CONF="" in the dosemu script. The file conf/dosemu.conf (as opposed to DOSEMU 1.0.2.x) is also ignored. POLICIES -------- All software herein can be distributed and used freely, most is GPL, other not GPL licenses can be found in the doc/* directories. -- Hans 2001/06/10 -- Bart Oldeman 2004/01/11