DOSEMU not working

[shimonl]

Hi,
I just got around to installing xdosemu on my FM system.
In Synaptic, xdosemu brings two pre-reqs: dosemu and dosemu-freedos.
After installing, the link in the launcher menu failed to start xdosemu,
so I tried plain dosemu from a konsole. Here is the result:

$ dosemu
In file included from built-in global.conf:682
                 from built-in global.conf:639
Error in built-in global.conf: (line 677) Disk-device/file /var/lib/dosemu/drives/c doesn't exist.
Error in built-in global.conf: (line 677) Disk-device/file /var/lib/dosemu/drives/d doesn't exist.
2 error(s) detected while parsing the configuration-file


xdosemu gets identical output.

Thanks for any help,
Shimon

[ro.criss]

Hi Shimon,
I recently upgraded my system and found my previously well-working dosemu stoped working giving me the same error message.
Durring the update, the install of dosemu-freedos complained about /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z not being a file, but a directory and stoped the update process.
So i renamed the existing directory /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z to something like /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z_old and restarted the update process.
This time dosemu_freedos updated without errors.
Anyway runing dosemu in the console gave me the error mesage you recevied.
Remembering the install complained about drive_z i checked /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z only to find out it was a file.
Checking the contents of the file revealed it looked like a sample of autoexec.bat .
Doing a rpm -qilv dosemu i noticed something weird : /etc/drives/c and /etc/drives/d were links to some files on /home/some_other_nonexisting_user/.
So i simply deleted /etc/drives/c and /etc/drives/d , renamed the file /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z to something else, renamed /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z_old from my previous install back to /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z and recreated the files /etc/drives/c and /etc/drives/d as links to /usr/share/dosemu/drive_z.
Afterwards, runing dosemu in console, everything went well.
The programs i usualy run in dos-emulation mode performed without errors.
I hope this is usefull to you.
Good luck.

[shimonl]

ro.criss,
First off - WELCOME to the PcLinuxOS forums!! I see that this was your post #1!!!

Thank you very much for the information, I will look into it tomorrow, no time now.
I hope to get back here with good news.

Shimon

[dm+]

You should try dosbox, if you haven't already.

[shimonl]

My son (who uses M$) mentioned DOSBOX to me, and I installed it.
It does run some of my DOS programs, but I find it much less
pleasant to work with. I would really prefer DOSEMU, if pinoc could
find the time to fix it. (I assume he is the one responsible, since
the non-existing user mentioned by ro.criss in

/home/some_other_nonexisting_user

was pinoc.
Unfortunately, his method of getting DOSEMU to work
did not help in my case.

Thank you for the good advice!
Shimon

[dm+]

It appears that the issue is linked with file permissions; you can run it as a root user, as it has been reported previously.

Quick hack (must be done as root, use at your own risk):

chmod 777 /usr/share/dosemu/*

Note that drive d: (pointing to /home/share/dosemu/drive_z) is read-only.

[shimonl]

Thank you dm+, but unfortunately it is not that simple.
freedos is really not correctly installed!

I tried your suggestion

It appears that the issue is linked with file permissions; you can run it as a root user, as it has been reported previously.

and ran dosemu as root.

Here is the result:

DOSEMU-FreeDOS is not available to boot DOSEMU.
Please enter the name of a Linux directory which contains a bootable DOS, or
press [Ctrl-C] to abort for manual installation of FreeDOS or another DOS, or
press [ENTER] to quit if you suspect an error after manual installation.
 
 <Here I pressed [ENTER]>

DOSEMU 1.4.0.6-79-g45b125c (2012-06-22), configured: 2013-04-19 19:17:39 -0500
Please test against a recent version before reporting bugs and problems.
Submit Bugs & Patches to linux-msdos@vger.kernel.org or via http://dosemu.org.
 
Sorry, there is no operating system here:
/var/lib/dosemu/drives/*
 
Please try to install FreeDOS from dosemu-freedos-*-bin.tgz
 
Press any key to return to Linux...

What dosemu said is eminently true:
# ls /var/lib/dos*
ls: cannot access /var/lib/dos*: No such file or directory


But I have installed the latest dosemu-freedos, according to Synaptic:



So something is apparently broken.

Thanks,
Shimon

[dm+]

I will agree with you.

On the system I am currently working, which has not been updated very recently, I just downloaded dosemu using synaptic and it worked off the box, as a normal user.

On one of my office computers I recently updated everything and nautilus (gnome file manager) has been misbehaving; it is apparently looping somewhere, topping cpu usage and showing the "clock - patch pattern" icon where image thumbnails ought to.  This has been linked in the past with glibc-2.0 incompatibilities.

So, if re-installation of these packages does not cure the problem, we will have to dig deeper...