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Re: Xy4-Dosemu startup and quit tweaks

Hi Rafe -- I wondered if that was why XyWrite got its own desktop. My
guess is that if you change yr XyWrite Alt+F4 keyboard line to null, Xy
will stop closing if you close the window above. In one of my attempts
to fix Alt+Tab, before I switched to Super+Tab, I removed the Tab
character from the Tab key in the Alt section of the Xy4 keyboard file,
and that did the trick.


I don't think it's Ubuntu that's hypersensitive to the keyboard.
Ubuntu's programs seem well-behaved, and I've never seen one respond to
keystrokes entered in another program. It seems to be related to dosemu,
but only when it's running another program. I've tested out Alt+F4 and
Ctrl+c on dosemu, and when it's at a dos prompt or not running Xy4, it
never closed; it's only when it's running XyWrite (or starting keystop)
that my problems appear.


I don't think I've had partimage complain that an unmounted partition
was mounted; as best I can recall, that aspect has run smoothly. (I
often run it off an unpowered usb hard drive that has a persistent
Ubuntu install, which should be a similar situation to your thumbdrive.)
I usually do stupid stuff like forgetting to run sudo, or not entering
the path in addition to the filename of the image file I'm creating.
BTW, if you've got a persistent Jaunty thumbdrive now, you can turn it
into even more of a rescue drive (should you ever need that, and if you
haven't already) by going to Ubuntu Rescue Remix and running the apt-get
install command at the bottom of page
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/Software. I believe that convertfs
doesn't install, but all the other tools do; you might need to remove
that from the command to get it to run smoothly.


I looked at Mendelson's WPDOS/Linux site a couple years ago, and at the
time I think I too made the suggested hogthreshold change, but I
reverted back when I didn't notice any difference. (And like you, I
don't think that fiddling with the CPU setting makes any difference in
how Xy runs; I have it set to 486 currently). I see the site's been
thoroughly updated and expanded since then, and has many more
suggestions that would have been helpful when I was running 7.04 and
7.10. I'll sit down and read through it again; thanks.


Paul

Raphael Tennenbaum wrote:


hi Paul --

since I've always used Ctrl-Q to quit, I haven't had that particular
problem quitting XyWrite -- however, thanks to what I can only term
Ubuntu's hypersensitivity, I have inadvertently closed a XyWrite
window after Alt-F4'ing the window above it, which is one reason I
keep XyW windows on their own separate desktop.


Alt-Tab I've found also a nuisance, since half the time it sticks a
tab into the Xy window out of which I'm attempting to switch. as a
consequence, in Compiz I mapped Ctrl-F12 as a window switcher, which
works smoothly and without incident. it's taken a bit of getting used
to, but now it's second nature.


this morning I put the finishing touches on my backup strategy by
installing Jaunty onto a $12 4-gig memory key. it took a bit of
brainpower to get Partimage to run successfully -- when booted from
the thumbdrive, I need to mount the Linux hard disk partition and then
unmount it before Partimage considers it unmounted -- but it now backs
up the boot partition to the external HD so I'm relieved to finally be
bulletproof. and with that, hopefully I'll never have to mess with
anything much under the hood again.


btw, looking through the WordPerfect under Dosemu page, I found where
I'd derived the inspiration for the hogthreshold (3) statement -- they
recommend it, which isn't surprising, since WP always seemed a bit
slow compared to XyW. other than that, however, it's got some pretty
good suggestions.


-rafe


Paul Lagasse wrote:

The following are some tweaks I'm using to improve starting and
quitting XyWrite in Dosemu in Ubuntu; I'm passing them along in case
they might be of use to anyone. I'd also be interested to know if
anyone else has encountered these issues and how they've handled them.


I launch XyWrite using the keyboard shortcut Super+x (WinKey = Super,
AKA Mod4), but since I began using keystop, Dosemu would often hang
on keystop when using the keyboard shortcut; it never happened when
clicking on a launcher icon. The issue appears to be one of keyboard
sensitivity, and though that can be tweaked via Linux keyboard
settings, the result was unsatisfactory and did not always solve the
problem.


The solution appears to be to pause before running keystop, which I
do via the Linux sleep command. I have added it to xy.bat, which I
use to start Xy4 (dosemu xy), before running keystop:


unix sleep 1s
c:\keystop\ks
c:\keystop\ksconfig bw
editor
exitemu

This pauses xy.bat for one second; a one second delay appears
sufficient to correct the problem. An extra "x" sometimes shows up in
the program window:


C:\>unix sleep 1s
x

before keystop runs.

Quitting Xy4-Dosemu also has had issues, except when doing so via the
command line (BC,quit,XC). Alt+F4 works fine, but if I had two
XyWrite windows open, one directly "on top" of the other on the
desktop, Alt+F4 would close both (but not a third Xy4-Dosemu window).
Also, closing another program with Alt+F4, when that program's window
was immediately above Xy4's, would also close Xy4. (And, if an open
file had not been saved or a program was running, XyWrite would close
anyway.) This is part of a larger issue; occasionally other keys and
key-combinations (Alt+Tab) intended for the system or another program
get captured by Xy4, but the effects are less serious.


Assigning the "Close Window" Linux keyboard shortcut to Super+F4
(instead of Alt+F4) prevented the closing of a Linux program window
from also closing an Xy4 window, but did not stop two Xy4 windows
from closing unless an open file had not been saved. Altering my
Alt+F4 key to run quit on the command line also did not help. What
has worked has been adding a Pause (BX,p,Q2) to Alt+F4 before
eXeCuting quit:


62=Q4XHBCq,u,i,t,BXp,Q2XC

Both changes, to Xy4's keyboard file and to Linux's keyboard
shortcuts, must be in place for this to work. If I make the changes
to Xy4's *.kbd but not to Linux's shortcuts, Alt+F4 will not close an
Xy4-Dosemu window that is directly under another Linux program; but
when two Xy4 windows are stacked and I close the first with Alt+F4,
both will close. That result surprised me.


One other item. Some programs that I had been running in a terminal
run much faster when you skip the terminal and launch them directly
(or via a script file) either from XyWrite's command line using
Dosemu's "system" command or via the "Run Application" dialog box
(its name in Gnome; usually assigned to Alt+F2 in the desktop
managers I've used). When I ran SP's nsgmls parser in Windows, where
I was running the DOS version, it took about 25 mins to process some
80 MB in 220 files; in gnome-terminal it took about 4 1/2 mins; when
I use the XyWrite command line to run in the background a script file
that launches the parser ("do/nv system parsefiles.sh&") the program
takes about 15 secs to finish.


Paul Lagasse