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Re: Dosemu practically full-screen

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