A full featured Dosemu needs to be suid root, e.g to access ports. Dosemu runs as suid "root" only where it is needed, and releases this right thereafter. But with DPMI, the Dos client programm can access the whole user space, hence also can modify the dosemu code itself. Use of the 'secure on' option in /etc/dosemu.conf disables this, but then you can't run any more some applications like 32-bit video games (lermen@elserv.ffm.fgan.de(97/2/11)). E.g. running a well known compiler with full access might have smaller security implications then some game, obtained by some obscure source.
Dosemu relies that the Dos-Version on the hdimage and the Drive you map to contain command.com are the same. If not, dosemu will crash sooner or later. With the dual boot option Win95 offers when pressing the F4,F5 and F8 Keys with the "Starting Win95" text, versions on the Win95 drive may swap. Take special care for command.com. Let your shell variable in config.emu point to the correct static version of command.com, e.g.: shell=c:\win95\command.com c:\ /P /E:1024 (97/02/28)
Learn about dosdebug and use it to control a dosemu session(97/2/9)
Learn about dosdebug and use it to control a dosemu session(97/2/9)
Daniel Barlow(jo95004@sable.ox.ac.uk) reported (95/4/8) that
If you have no terminal or network access that you can use to log in,
you may have to press the reset button. If you can still get a usable
shell somehow, run "kbd_mode -a" to switch the keyboard out of
raw mode, and/or "stty sane" on the console so that you can see
what you're typing.
A useful thing to do is to use a script to run dosemu, and run
"kbd_mode -a" automatically right after dosemu. When dosemu
crashes, the script usually will resume running, and execute the
"kbd_mode -a" command.
Rob Janssen (rob@pe1chl.ampr.org) reported (94/7/11)
Don't forget to load the provided ems.sys from the config.sys file.
(94/8/11)
Grab and install klogd. Try
sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Daemons/sysklogd1.2.tgz
Aldy Hernandez (aldy@sauron.cc.andrews.edu) reported (94/7/8) that
You should disable your video and/or BIOS caching.
JyiJiin Luo (jjluo@casbah.acns.nwu.edu) reported (94/4/19) that
I experienced exactly the same problem before. I figured out all the video shadow in my AMI BIOS must be disabled. Now dosemu runs fine on my system.
In some cases it is useful to play with the value of the
HogThreshold variable in your dosemu.conf file.
Daniel Barlow(jo95004@sable.ox.ac.uk) reported (95/4/8) that
HogThreshold should now be set to approximately half of the BogoMips value that the system reports on boot.
Vinod G Kulkarni (vinod@cse.iitb.ernet.in) reported (94/4/7) that
When a CDROM is mounted from linux and used from within dosemu (mapped drive), there could be some problems. The CD-ROM driver (iso9660) in the kernel tries to find out the type of the file (i.e. binary or text). If it can't find, it tries to guess the type of the file using a heuristic. This heuristic fails under some circumstances when a (almost) text file is to be treated as binary. (I do not know if it is a bug or feature.)
The result of this is that if you copy such a file from CD-ROM (from
linux itself, and not necessarily dosemu), the resulting file will be
usually bigger than original file. (Blanks get added before
^J,^M.) So a program running in dosemu gives an error or
hangs, which may be mistaken as problem of dosemu.
Rob Janssen (pe1chl@rabo.nl) reported (94/8/10) that
The way to solve this is to turn off conversion altogether. Pass the option "-o conv=binary" to the mount command mounting the CD-ROM, or use the following in /etc/fstab:
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 conv=binary,roNo patches to the kernel are necessary.
Daniel Barlow(jo95004@sable.ox.ac.uk) reported (95/4/8) that
As of dosemu 0.60, debugging output is redirected to a file specified
on the command line. Use "dos -D+a -o /tmp/debug" to log all
debug output to /tmp/debug. There should no longer be any
need to redirect stderr.
Nick Holloway (alfie@dcs.warwick.ac.uk) reported (94/2/22) that
After running dos after playing with some stty settings, I was getting doubled key presses. I can now reveal what the reason is!
It only happens when dos is run on the console with 'istrip' set. This is (I think) because the raw scancodes are mutilated by the 'istrip', so that key release events look like key press events.
So, the input processing needs to be turned off when using the scan codes on a console (it wouldn't be a good idea to do it for tty lines).