The install from source works beautifully. I love dosemu; I think the developers are great people, very helpful and responsive. This surely must be one of the best projects in the free software world.
But I would like to have dosemu available to dummies, a.k.a. ordinary users. I tried out the binary install. First, very thoroughly, I removed all previous installations of dosemu, freedos, and the dosemu fonts. Then I downloaded from www.dosemu.org dosemu-1.2.0-bin.tgz dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz A) I did what README.bindist says. $mkdir mydos $cd mydos $tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz tar (child): dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz: Cannot open: No such file or directory tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now tar: Child returned status 2 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors Oops. The tarball should have been moved into ~/mydos first. This is obvious, but not obvious to dummies. B) $cd $cd mydos $mv ../dose*z . Again we follow the instructions in README.bindist: $tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz tar (child): dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz: Cannot open: No such file or directory tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now tar: Child returned status 2 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors Ahh.. the name of the file is different. Why, BTW? We should rename it, according to the dosemu.org homepage, when we compile from source. But we are using the binary distribution! C) Third attempt $tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz $tar -zxf dosemu-1.2.0-bin.tgz This works. BTW why -zxf instead of vzxf? The v option gives some reassuring feedback to users. $ cd mydos $ ./xdosemu ERROR: X: Unable to open font "vga"ERROR: , trying "vga"... ERROR: X: Unable to open font "vga"ERROR: , trying "9x15"... And an x-dosemu window opens using an X terminal font. The binary install canÂt do the xset trick for including Xfonts in the font path. The same, of course, happens if you do NOT create a subdir called mydos. The dosemu-bin and dosemu-freedos packages can also just be unpacked from ~ (where the Ordinary User normally downloads it), with all the stuff ending up in ~/dosemu. So why mydos? Of course these problems are trivial for reasonably sophisticated users. But many ordinary users just give up. CanÂt we *at the very least* provide some instructions which, if followed to the letter, make the software work? IsnÂt this worth some effort? Regards, Jan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-msdos" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
