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Re: Dosemu practically full-screen

Hi Rafe,
I have a suggestion for (what I think is) a non-ugly scalable font for
dosemu. In my .dosemurc file my font is:

$_X_font = "-monotype-andale
mono-medium-r-normal--0-0-140-160-m-0-iso10646-1"

(I think andale comes with MS truetype corefonts package.) It's nice
window on a 1440x900 screen, and scales nicely to fullscreen, if you are
able to get to fullscreen. I played with the font size by changing
"140-160" by increments of 10; the first number controls the horizontal
aspect of the font and the second the vertical.


The following setting:
$_X_font = "-monotype-andale
mono-medium-r-normal--0-0-180-170-m-0-iso10646-1"

produces a near-faux-fullscreen on 1440x900 with the Launcher set to
hide; can't get ride of the window title bar though, unlike dosemu's
scalable vga font. Tweaking "180-170" might get you something that works
on your resolution, if you prefer the font and can abide the titlebar in
"fullscreen."


Paul

On 11/19/2012 09:45 AM, Raphael wrote:

Hi Paul --
I've tested with all of dosemu's native fonts. Once upon a time in a
search for the perfect dosemu I dug deep into some obscure website and
downloaded & tried around a couple dozen fonts -- including,
mistakenly, some modified Turkish ones -- but nothing came of it.

The one that I like the most is vga11x19, which looks pretty good
windowed and full-screen (when FS works, as in 12.04 with the NVidia
173 driver) and "bad" fullscreen, i.e., the screen surrounded by empty
black space instead of text reaching the screen borders. All the other
fonts are essentially unusable for me -- except, ironically, now the
ugly default one, which in fauxscreen actually looks okay, it sort of
reminds me of my 1986 Leading Edge monitor.

I actually don't care for Unity 2D. I tried to use it on the netbook
in the interest of conserving resources and found it was hardly more
efficient; and the cube is very appealing to me -- for some reason, it
seems to help me keep track of things in a way that simply clicking
through virtual desktops does not.

In any case, to answer your question, the font on this Lenovo netbook
has mediocre-but-still-useable fullscreen Xy -- that is, good, crisp
font, but with the big black border. (I think the first netbook I
owned, an Asus -- back when they were reliable, four years ago, though
I might get one of their tablets -- I could get a nice fullscreen Xy,
but not on the next one.)

The Lenovo uses an Intel chipset -- which is one of many reasons I
have wondered whether the LinuXy Grail, a beautiful full-screen dosemu
font, might be grasped by somehow getting into the xorg settings and
specifying another bitmapped font -- or even designing one, but that's
just a fantasy and a terribly-ill-informed one at that.

I think your eyes must be better than mine -- but I also like having
an all-black screen to shut out all other distractions, though with
the Unity panel above it all, I still get a window onto the real
(virtual) world. I have to say, having Xy as a cubeface feels really
cool, in fact this setup is pretty close to perfection, but that's Linux.

My understanding has been that xdosemu is preferable, and until this
week I always used it. My dim recollection of what was once a very
poor understanding is that xdosemu uses xterm "directly" while dosemu
uses the default terminal emulation which I guess in Ubuntu is
gnome-terminal, but you ought to consider that I scarcely understand
what I just typed.


-rafe

On 11/18/2012 11:08 AM, Paul Lagasse wrote:
Rafe,
I haven't had problems with fullscreen Xywrite but I tend not to use
it because of the simplicity of moving back and forth between Xy4
and other programs when not fullscreen. Also, on a 19 in. desktop
monitor, fullscreen really isn't nec. And, mostly importantly and
probably deserving of mention first, I don't have an nVidia card,
just Intel, so it's not a valid comparison.

I tend not to use Mint currently because I'm heavily tweaked for
Ubuntu since 10.04 (use quicklists a lot for quick access from
several related programs/items from one launcher), but do like Mint.
Also, in Mint, I've had some access issues on certain sites that want
specific browsers; Firefox in Ubuntu was fine, Firefox in Mint not.

What are your font settings for dosemu when you run into problems?
(IE, other than dosemu's ugly base font.) And have you tried forcing
Unity 2D for your 12.04 session -- 2D has its limitations, but if
fullscreen is what you want, it might solve your problems.

Yr comments re xdosemu vs dosemu with Nouveau intrigue me; I thought
xdosemu was just a link to dosemu, and the dosemu under X (not in
terminal and the like) and xdosemu were the same. (My launcher, just
for reference, is "dosemu.bin xy".)


Paul Lagasse

On 11/17/2012 03:27 PM, Raphael wrote:
On 11/17/2012 09:36 AM, Jeff Seager wrote:
Rafe,
I've not been using Xy within Ubuntu for some time, but have
noticed the recent issues with nVidia drivers.

I have Win XP on one partition, Ubuntu 12.04 on a second and Linux
Mint 11 on a third. I alternate among these for various tasks.
Linux Mint is stable and the nVidia drivers work flawlessly, while
Ubuntu seems (as you say) to have had issues for about six months.

Although I like the new Unity interface in Ubuntu, these issuesare
moving me toward Mint. I'm just mentioning this to validate your
point andsuggest a possible alternative.

I suppose I have drunk the Ubuntu Kool-Aid, but despite the problems
I've had with 12.04 generally (not specific to XyWrite, mostly
Unity/Compiz) I'm sticking with Ubuntu & Unity. For one thing, I
just installed 12.10 on another partition, and it is working quite
well. Plus I cannot say for sure that the problems I had with 12.04
didn't stem from a LOT of cruft left over from as far back as 10.4
and erm maybe even 8something -- and though when I installed 12.10,
it took half a day to go through the list of all my old packages to
strip down to the bare minimum, it was worth it.

I don't think Paul Lagasse has had any problems using fullscreen
XyWrite under Mint, either. I would never rule out going down a fork
and saying sayonara to Shuttleworth who certainly at times seems a
nutjob, but in the end, I am such a big fan of the lenses and HUD,
things like the Amazon fiasco don't really bother me. I'm probably
going to be in the market for a tablet in the next few months & the
idea of putting Ubuntu on one is actually kind of exciting to me.

In the interests of comparing notes, here are my experiences with
dosemu/Xy and an NVidia GEForce 8400 under Ubuntu:


A) Nouveau
The Nouveau driver running Unity looks okay on my monitor -- not
great, but perfectly acceptable. I ran it under this Quantal Quetzal
(12.10) install for a couple of days, and basically thought it was
sound until some things involving the lenses started to corrupt the
screen. Moreover, under Nouveau, fullscreen dosemu is a big problem:

1) under xdosemu, going fullscreen shoots the entire session dead in
the water -- the screen goes completely blank, and nothing is
accessible in any way -- not by toggling out of f.s, nor exiting
Ubuntu to a command prompt, nada. hard reboot.

2) however with plain old dosemu, even though the screen becomes
unusable toggled fullscreen, it *is* possible to recover by toggling
Ctrl+Alt+F back to the desktop. Particularly since after a few years
of C-A-F'ing between Xy and the Ubuntu desktop the gesture is hard
to get rid of, some unpleasant surprises have er convinced me launch
plain dosemu instead of xdosemu.


B) NVidia
The only NVidia driver that has really worked f.s. for me is pretty
old, 173 (they are up to about 310 now). Very handsome, fonts nicely
customizable. Occasionally if I try to get into fullscreen I'd get a
white screen instead -- but toggling back and forth fixed the problem.

I have a Precise Pangolin (12.04) installation which was my
day-to-day until I got fed up with Compiz weirdness -- that's the
one I have been running with the 173 NVidia driver.

When I have tried newer NVidia drivers, dosemu results have been
terrible -- sometimes I get giant letters in an unusable Xy screen;
and though I am able to toggle back to the Unity desktop, it usually
is now displaying in something like 800x600 resolution instead of
the 1920x1080.

Installing the 173 driver is problematic under Quantal. I just now
installed the 304 driver (they are up to 310, so theoretically this
should be a ways back from the bleeding edge) and Unity looks
altogether much nicer than with the Nouveau driver, and "fauxscreen
Xy" is slightly crisper & brighter and seems more responsive, as
does the system altogether. Hopefully this will be workable for the
long haul.


Rafe