dosemu and com port problem resolved

dosemu and com port problem resolved

[Cheryl Homiak]

I finally am able to use serial ports with dosemu; there is a bug in the stable
version that won't allow lock files to be created without suid root. I solved
this by obtaining and compiling the 1.1.3 version (development) from
www.dosemu.org. For any interested debian users, I understand that the
maintainer of the package has fixed the bug in our 1.0.2.1--whatever version and
the upgrade will be out shortly.
Pcisk and megadots both work with dosemu; you need to put in the number of
kilobytes for dpmi in the dosemu.conf for megadots to work.
The one catch turns out to be that brltty is stopped dead in its tracks, I
assume during the initialization process when starting dosemu. This does not
happen with speakup, however; speakup keeps
going right to the dos prompt and beyond. It isn't probably just the piece of
equipment being used, as I was using the same equipment for brltty and speakup.
However, it is possible to kill brltty before entering dosemu and
then start up a DOS speech screen reader on the same equipment. It is also
possible simply not to include the serial port on which brltty is running in
your dosemu.conf file. In that case, brltty keeps running happily on the dosemu
console as well as all other consoles during the dosemu session. If one does
accidentally leave brltty installed when starting dosemu, brltty dies but can be
restarted again on exiting dosemu with a restart command (chord-r with
braillelite), so apparently brltty
isn't completely killed. In fact if you assume it was killed and type 'brltty"
after exiting dosemu, you will probably be dealing with more than one brltty!
At any rate, I'm happy to have access to the serial ports under dosemu now.
thanks to all who helped.

Re: dosemu and com port problem resolved

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Cheryl Homiak on March 23, 2002, at 10:45]

>The one catch turns out to be that brltty is stopped dead in its tracks, I
>assume during the initialization process when starting dosemu.

I don't know DOS very well, but I suspect that dosemu is doing some kind of
port probing (which doesn't bother BRLTTY itself, but which will most likely
bother the braille display). What's basically happening is that you're placing
two operating systems in charge of the same device, and that's never a good
thing to do. It's better to configure your dosemu so that it only has access to
the devices it's supposed to see. Nothing stops you from mapping dosemu's COM1
to the real COM2 (to use DOS terminology).

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Re: dosemu and com port problem resolved

[John J. Boyer]

Cheryl,
Could you explain how to get dosemu started quickly with enough memory
for MegaDots and not using com1? I've downloded dosemu-1.3.1 and want to
gert to work. If you also received a personal message from me, I'm
posting this again because you may not be receiving my e-mail again or I
might not be receiving yours. My apogies to others on the list, but I
think this might be of interest to some of them also.
John
On Sat, 23 Mar 2002,
Cheryl Homiak wrote:

> I finally am able to use serial ports with dosemu; there is a bug in the stable
> version that won't allow lock files to be created without suid root. I solved
> this by obtaining and compiling the 1.1.3 version (development) from
> www.dosemu.org. For any interested debian users, I understand that the
> maintainer of the package has fixed the bug in our 1.0.2.1--whatever version and
> the upgrade will be out shortly.
> Pcisk and megadots both work with dosemu; you need to put in the number of
> kilobytes for dpmi in the dosemu.conf for megadots to work.
> The one catch turns out to be that brltty is stopped dead in its tracks, I
> assume during the initialization process when starting dosemu. This does not
> happen with speakup, however; speakup keeps
> going right to the dos prompt and beyond. It isn't probably just the piece of
> equipment being used, as I was using the same equipment for brltty and speakup.
> However, it is possible to kill brltty before entering dosemu and
> then start up a DOS speech screen reader on the same equipment. It is also
> possible simply not to include the serial port on which brltty is running in
> your dosemu.conf file. In that case, brltty keeps running happily on the dosemu
> console as well as all other consoles during the dosemu session. If one does
> accidentally leave brltty installed when starting dosemu, brltty dies but can be
> restarted again on exiting dosemu with a restart command (chord-r with
> braillelite), so apparently brltty
> isn't completely killed. In fact if you assume it was killed and type 'brltty"
> after exiting dosemu, you will probably be dealing with more than one brltty!
> At any rate, I'm happy to have access to the serial ports under dosemu now.
> thanks to all who helped.
>
>
>
>
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> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list@redhat.com
> https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
>

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