Some months ago I was hired to do some software updates on a local
company's inventory package. It had been written in QuickBASIC in the
late 1980s, and it was still running on a six-node Novell Lite peer
network on IBM PS/2s running IBM DOS 6.22.
The company had a six month old Gateway box with XP sitting on each
desk and a monster quad-processor server with a terabye RAID arracy
running Windows Server 2003. It had been bought to support a fancy
Windows-based inventory package they'd bought into, then bailed on when
it didn't work as advertised. They wanted me to move the software onto
the new XP boxes and retire the PS/2s, some of which were 15 years old.
Skipping over several weeks of grief and Googling, it turned out that
XP's DOS emulation mode is severely broken, particularly with anything
to do with printing. After consulting with some XP gurus and MCSEs, it
was apparent that the old DOS software and XP were never going to get along.
I then tried VMware and DOSbox, fully expecting they would work. They
didn't. I still think they should have, but I admit I didn't spent a
whole lot of time with them, being angry and frustrated by fighting XP's
weirdness.
I felt I'd given it my best shot. I'd already billed my client more
than I was comfortable with to take me up the Windows learning curve.
Now it was time for the heavy artillery.
I downloaded a copy of SuSE 10.2 (they were already running Novell
Lite, so why not keep it all in the family?), repartitioned one of the
hard drives, installed, and installed DOSEMU 1.2.2. The software came
up. I built a new kernel to support smbfs and connected to the 2003
Server box with Samba. I checked every function, including printing.
"Mission Control, we have liftoff."
I prepared a brief presentation to my client on why I wanted to dump
the operating system they'd paid for with something else. They said
they didn't care, do whatever it took to make it work.
Last week, we went live. Seven SuSE workstations running DOSEMU 1.4,
with Samba shares mounted as DOS drive letters. All the printers are on
D-Link Ethernet-to-parallel boxes.
Everything went flawlessly, and the users love it, the boss loves it,
and the people who are paying me love it. It doesn't get any better
than that.
I'd like to thank all of the people who've worked on DOSEMU over the
years, its current maintainers, and whoever thought to package it with
FreeDOS so you just do "rpm -Uvh doesmu..." and it "just works".
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