Dosemu practically full-screen

[Raphael rtennenbaum@xxxxxxxx]

For the several folks who use XyWrite under Linux:
If you prefer to use Xy fullscreen, you may have noticed that software
and hardware support for fullscreen Dosemu seems to be vanishing, slowly
but apparently ineluctably.
For the last six months, every time I have tried to use the latest
Nvidia drivers for Ubuntu, my fullscreen DOS sessions have essentially
blown up -- become unusable in myriad ways.The problem is, it's not a
very high priority either for manufacturers of display cards or
open-source software engineers. Nvidia is a big villain in the FOSS
world, and while they seem to be interested in taking a few steps in the
right direction, I cannot imagine them caring about maybe a hundred of
us who want to use fullscreen Dosemu.
However, I think I've found a workaround that while not entirely
satisfactory, is pretty darned good, and also brings some benefits. As
seems to be so often the case, we have Ed Mendelson's fine understanding
of Dosemu to thank.
It turns out that specifying *no* font in the preferences file,
.dosemurc, forces Dosemu to use its own bitmapped font. While it's not
an especially attractive font, it's usable -- plus it offers the great
benefit of being scalable -- you can resize the window and the font size
will increase.
In fact, you can resize it to fill up the entire screen, which
essentially gives you fullscreen dosemu. The added bonus here is that
*this* more-or-less fullscreen Dosemu session allows the user to access
other desktop programs without exiting and re-entering a separate
fullscreen session. This is not only way faster, it lets you put your
faux-but-who-cares fullscreen session on one face of the Compiz rotating
desktop cube, which is big news as far as I'm concerned. Mirabile dictu,
this use works with Ubuntu's own open-source Nouveau driver, which falls
short in some ways -- but not in this one.

-Rafe T.