[clug] Using DOSemu

[Bob Edwards]

On 12/8/19 11:00 am, George at Clug via linux wrote:
...
> All,
> 
> If anyone has DOSemu experience, please comment on my three statements below;

Hi George,

I don't have any recent experience with DOSemu, but I wouldn't recommend
it over, eg. some form of VM (VirtualBox, KVM etc.).

One main reason is that DOSemu provides very little isolation between
what the DOS program is doing and the rest of your Linux system, so if
the DOS program were to behave badly (eg. has a virus etc.), you
potentially expose your entire Linux system.

Running DOS and Windows programs inside a full VM can manage this risk
to a much greater extent.

cheers,
Bob Edwards.

> 
> 1) I would recommend using the DOSemu that comes with your distribution over downloading source and building it. Makes upgrading your Distro less troublesome, and the DOSemu in your distro should be better designed to work with your distro.
> 
> 2) Using the standard configuration for most settings would be preferable, the package maintainers for your distro are likely to know way more about DOSemu, that we would. However if you are dealing with serial ports, then you will need to configure this correctly for your particular hardware. See http://dosemu.org/docs/README/1.4/config.html as a good description of what can be configured.
> 
> 3) It is recommended to install a DOS into DOSemu, and FreeDOS is the preferred as it is the most compatible DOS to use. Would you agree?
> 
> I was hoping to run Windows 3.11 using DOSemu, but know I am not sure if that is a good idea after reading http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DOSEMU-HOWTO-8.html
> 
> Below are some links I believe are worth reading before attempting to use DOSemu.
> 
> =================================
> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DOSEMU-HOWTO-1.html#ss1.5
> http://dosemu.org/docs/HOWTO/
> 1.5 Do I need MS-DOS to use dosemu ?
> 
> No. You need some version of DOS but not necessarily MS-DOS. See the section "What versions of DOS are known to run with dosemu ?"
> =================================
> 
> I wanted to run a Windows 98 environment to run Windows 98 programs, but it seems that Wine should be a more suitable way to try and do this.
> 
> ================================
> 1.6 Can I run Microsoft Windows programs under dosemu ?
> Not reliably. You would be better to use the Windows emulator Wine ( http://www.winehq.com).
> ================================
> 
> To set up DOSemu correctly, it seems I will have to read the "README.txt" file, and this page should help too http://dosemu.org/docs/README/1.4/config.html
> 
> ================================
> http://dosemu.org/docs/README/1.4/config.html
> 
> http://dosemu.org/docs/HOWTO/
> 2.6. What configurable options are available?
> 
> The compiletime-settings.help file describes the options you can change at compile time. README.txt describes the options you can change at run time.
> 
>      [Options]
>      Logo=0
>      BootGUI=0
> ================================
> 
> 
> ================================
> https://mxlinux.org/wiki/system/dosemu/
> 
> Introduction
> DOSEMU stands for DOS Emulation, and allows you to run DOS and many DOS programs, including many DPMI applications such as DOOM and Windows 3.1, under Linux.
> Installation
> DOSEMU is available in the repos. As installed, it must be run as root. To run DOSEMU as a normal user, it is necessary to edit the file as root
> /etc/sysctl.conf
> by adding as the last line:
> vm.mmap_min_addr=0
> 
> ================================
> 
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSEMU
> 
> https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/dosemu.1.html
> 
> http://archives.linuxfromscratch.org/mail-archives/hints/2002-January/000400.html
> 
> 
> https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/find-out-linux-serial-ports-with-setserial/
> Task: Display Detected System’s Serial Support
> 
> Simple run dmesg command
> $ dmesg | grep tty
> 
> Output:
> 
> [   37.531286] serial8250: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
> [   37.531841] 00:0b: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
> [   37.532138] 0000:04:00.3: ttyS1 at I/O 0x1020 (irq = 18) is a 16550A
> 
> setserial command
> 
> setserial is a program designed to set and/or report the configuration information associated with a serial port. This information includes what I/O port and IRQ a particular serial port is using, and whether or not the break key should be interpreted as the Secure Attention Key, and so on. Just type the following command:
> $ setserial -g /dev/ttyS[0123]
> 
> Output:
> 
> /dev/ttyS0, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x03f8, IRQ: 4
> /dev/ttyS1, UART: 16550A, Port: 0x1020, IRQ: 18
> /dev/ttyS2, UART: unknown, Port: 0x03e8, IRQ: 4
> /dev/ttyS3, UART: unknown, Port: 0x02e8, IRQ: 3
> 
> setserial with -g option help to find out what physical serial ports your Linux box has
> 
> 
> 
>