On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Mike Duncan wrote:
> can I use DOSEMU to boot up into Windows 95? It is essentially DOS 7.0,
> after all.........
It will boot up but won't run the GUI. It'll be quite useless to
boot into Win95. Coz it's not _that_ DOSish either.
> Do I need to re-partition my Windows drive into a WIN/DOS partition?
> The problem is that I am trying to convert my whole system over to
> Linux, but my son's programs are all DOS programs installed under
> Windows 95. If not, is there a way of installing my son's DOS programs
> under Linux (which would obviously be preferable, anyway) ??
I don't see a need to repartition. I'd suggest the following
approach: get hold of a DOS that's capable of long filenames
(this is preferable but not mandatory, freedos - which comes with
dosemu - doesn't handle it yet), use the bootdir feature of
dosemu to boot this dos from some dir in your linux tree, mount
the win partition under linux (vfat etc. supports lfn and
fancy'n'all), inside dosemu assign a drive letter to this mounted
drive (along the lines of lredir e: something). You should now be
able to access all your files on /dev/hdb via e: or similar. You
won't be able to boot Win from that. It'll probably just hang if
you try. Some of your son's DOS programs may not run coz they've
been installed for a different drive letter.
The solution that I consider clean and which I'd prefer is to get
rid of Win and maybe the partition. Then use bootdir to make a
c: drive for booting. Then link in any other linux dirs via
lredir in dosemu (gives more drive letters) or ln -s in Linux
(a single dir tree with DOS :-).
Your DOS programs should/might run under DOSEMU. However, which
way you chose for running dosemu doesn't really matter except
maybe for vga graphics which might work better under xdos.
If you are concerned about what your son can do with dosemu you
could consider creating a couple of .dexe wrappers for his
programs.
Karsten
