Msg: Re: Dosemu practically full-screen

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 2:33 PM, Raphael mailto:rtennenbaum@xxxxxxxx wrote:

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.