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.