Bob Zimmerman wrote:
An excellent question which I would love answered as well. My experience so far with Dosbox and
Dosemu mirrors yours. Dosbox was quite easy to get running, and works great. It doesn't have printer
support, but other than that it works.
My effort to run Dosemu, however, has been a struggle. I know I could eventually get it going, but
no one has told me why. I know that Jeff Seager switched from Dosbox to Dosemu. I'd be very
interested in finding out why. What were Dosemu's advantages over Dosbox?
Both dosbox and dosemu work fine for me (in Ubuntu 7.10), and ran
straightforwardly without any tinkering except what you'd expect re PATH
etc. But dosbox is far and away slower, reminiscent of a good 486, while
dosemu runs at speeds similar to that of a WinXP dos box. But there's a
posting at dosemu.org that says XyWrite runs in dosemu 1.4 like a snail
-- so who knows -- I'm running dosemu 1.4 and I'm very happy, though
still testing. I don't know if the poster at dosemu.org said what
version of XyWrite he/she was running, but I run Xy4. Maybe the issue is
the Linux distro, or how dosemu was installed.
Dosemu allows for more communication with X windows than dosbox does, as
far as I know. So, in dosemu you can use standard X windows practice to
paste a selection into XyWrite without any significant problem that I
can see. Unfortunately when pasting into a Linux program from
XyWrite/Dosemu you can only paste what's visible in the XyWrite/dosemu
window, and the result resembles that of the Win dos box "mark, copy,
paste" routine, albeit with less effort.
If you shell to DOS in dosemu, you can run Linux commands using "unix
[command]" (you can't do this in dosbox) -- thus "unix gnome-terminal"
at the dos prompt will launch a gnome-terminal -- not very useful, but a
surprise the first time you do it. XyWrite/dosemu, BTW, is suspended
until you close the gnome-terminal window. Because of the unix command,
I have also been able to paste into XyWrite from Linux by assigning to
an Xy key a two-command XPL program that invokes "do/nv unix
/path/scriptname" to copy the X clipboard contents (using xclip) to a
file and then MErges that file at the cursor in XyWrite. The unix
command will allow you to redirect the output of a command into a file;
unfortunately you can't redirect a file's contents to a command (like
xclip), so I can't write an XPL program that will reverse this process
and send XyWrite text to the X (Linux) clipboard using a single keystroke.
You can edit the dosemu.conf and .dosemurc files so that you can resize
the dosemu window at will (with limitations) by grabbing the edge of the
window; don't know if you can do this with dosbox. You can also edit the
aforementioned two files so that when dosemu/XyWrite is minimized the
label will be "XyWrite" (instead of "xdosemu")-- don't know if you can
do this with dosbox (it's a small but helpful change). Printing I
haven't explored yet.
Paul