XyWrite in Ubuntu Linux

["Fred Weiner" fw1948@xxxxxxxx]

Friends,

A little while ago 'peregrine' wrote:

"Tonight I located and customized the configuration file for DOSBOX (still haven't mastered the mysterious Linux directory structure, so it took some trial and error to find it and I got incredibly lucky and saved it in a totally different directory which turned out to be the correct one). I modified it to "comment out" all the sound elements because I won't be using this computer for DOS games or anything else requiring sound. XyWrite now runs much quicker and smoother, but seems to have a few hiccups still. Some of these almost certainly have to do with settings carried over from my recycled U2 registry (
http://STARTUP.INT has been tweaked already). Turns out DOSBOX includes its own very clever "keymapper" that was a breeze to figure out, so I have no known hotkey conflicts now."



He also (very kindly) included a link to his page displaying screenshots of XY running in DOSBox under Ubuntu Linux. I have had similar success running our favorite word processor on my Mac Mini Duo-core (Mac OSX being unix based). Looks great, works well, with the following deficiencies:


1. I can not print from DOSBox. The plain text configuration file is called 'DOSBox Preferences' (no quotes). The unix path to this file on my system is /user/myusername/library/preferences/DOSBox Preferences. That's where DOSBox looks by default for it's directives. I'm talking about version
7.0 for Mac OSX; this may vary in the releases for other systems.  This file contains a heading labeled [printer] which I include here ('#' starts a comment line):

[printer]

# printer -- Enable printer emulation.\n"
# dpi -- Resolution of printer (default 360).
# width -- Width of paper in 1/10 inch (default 85 = 8.5'').
# height -- Height of paper in 1/10 inch (default 110 =
11.0'').
# output -- Output method for finished pages:
#   png : Creates PNG images in the DOSBOX directory
#   ps : Creates Postscript documents in the DOSBOX directory (default)
#   bmp : Creates BMP images (very huge files, not recommend)\n"

#   printer : Send to an actual printer (Print dialog will appear)
#   multipage -- Adds all pages to one Postscript file or printer job until ALT-F8 is pressed.

printer=true
output=ps

As you can see, my mostly default settings should send XY's output, via a dialog, to an actual printer. What happens instead is that a
xxxx.tmp file is written to the XY directory and nothing happens with the printer at all.

2. None of the U2 routines associated with MS Windows work, as would be expected. There is no use of XyShell, or any of the U2 frames that use REXX to interface with the MSWindows OS.


Being designed for playing DOS games, it's amazing that I can do all the writing and editing I want using XyWrite 4.011. Oh, and it's free. No fees to Parallels, which I tried on trial and found difficult to use. As I continue to work with this, I will try to solve the printing issue by acquiring the *NIX version of GHOSTSCRIPT; I'll keep you informed if I succeed.


I hope this post comes through without formatting confusion, and that it is helpful to at least someone. (Peregrine, have you figured out how to print? I found the DOSBox keymapper very hard to use, so I downloaded "
mapper.txt" from the DOSBox forum for Macs, written for someone like me using the Dvorak
keyboard; putting it in the directory with the DOSBox executable gave me everything I needed. Then
it was a simple matter of editing my KBD file . . .).


Fred Weiner