I'm cautiously optimistic about making this work. It has been a great learning experience!
I should clarify this: Although I have run XyWrite III+ in Ubuntu briefly, I'm focused on XyWrite 4.018 including the XYWWWEB U2 version 117. If I can get this to work reasonably well, I'll upgrade to the current U2 version 119.
As I read through the XYWWWEB documentation, I see occasional references to functions that work in Win 3.x or OS/2 but don't work in later Windows variants. I don't know, but I can imagine, that this means Carl and Robert and others have gone to some effort to hook into specific functions in MS-DOS or PC-DOS. If these specific functions are different (or nonexistent) in the Ubuntu Linux version of DOSBox, I may be wasting at least some of my time.
I welcome any shared insights or discussion about this. I'm hoping I can weed out U2 modules that aren't compatible with DOSBox/Linux, if my hypothesis is correct. More importantly, I'm hoping that the core XyWrite functions will all perform as intended in this DOSBox-within-Linux environment. It isn't clear to me yet whether some of my problems are due to simple keymapping errors, especially in the "function" keys between F1 and F12. Both XyWrite and DOSBox rely heavily on those keys for their most essential functions.
There is a DOSBox version written for Windows XP that may have an active user group (I haven't found such a group for the Linux port of DOSBox). So for those who lament the absence of DOS under XP and Vista, this also may be an opportunity to keep XyWrite alive there.
I've tweaked the DOSBox configuration file to make XyWrite run much faster than the default settings allowed (initially, it took almost a minute for the XYWWWEB index to open; now I'm down to about three seconds), and I'm still finding good resources online to help with that. They are scarce, though. DOSBox was conceived as a way to keep old DOS-based games alive, and I'm constantly reminding myself that XyWrite's overhead is far less than any game that needs to render video and sound. I quickly figured out how to turn off video and sound components of DOSBox, and now I'm learning how to reallocate all of that memory space to XyWrite. I'm encouraged by the results so far.
I aim to post a tutorial soon on how to get XyWrite installed in Ubuntu, offering with it a set of files to make that easier ("Xybuntu version .01" ... purely tongue-in-cheek). I hope that some few of you might try it for yourselves and add your wealth of Xy-knowledge to help me make adjustments. The tutorial is about 85 percent written, and I'm trying to keep it purely functional and non-technical. I think it needs to be a little more verbose than a simple how-to checklist, but I'll let you judge that when you see it. I want to be clear that your feedback on all of this is more than welcome, even if you chide me for wasting my time.
The package of files relies on a little more tweaking of DOSBox's lone configuration file, because I want this to work for the rest of you better than it worked initially for me. For now at least, I'll post the tutorial and file download on a dismal corner of my own dismal website and simply point to it from the list, so as not to clutter the normal XyWrite conversation.
To those who have expressed an interest in this (especially Patricia, Daniel and Stephen), please accept my very sincere thanks for the much-needed encouragement!
Jeff