On 18 Sep 2009 at 21:11, Alain Mouette wrote: > > Would it be possible to run dosemu over a simple system like framebuffer? > > I am interested in making a simple linux, with something like BusyBox, > only to run dos programs... > > Alain > While I was looking for some solutions to my problem, I noticed there's vgaemu - the emulator that's used to display VGA graphics in a window under XWindows. Immediately it occurred to me that it might be useful to run run vgaemu outside of X, in "console mode", i.e. rendering its output into a (Linux standard) framebuffer. According to some notes in the documentation, this is possible if you compile DOSEMU with support for SDL (configure --with-SDL, if memory serves). The SDL library can work without X and in that case, it renders its output into a framebuffer device. Obviously you need to have SDL installed in the build system first (and included in your target distro). SDL support is a DOSEMU plugin and you need to explicitly ask for that at compile time (configure time, really) as well as at runtime, by including the -S cmdline switch. I do have that compiled in, but I haven't gotten as far as actually testing that feature, because others have pointed out a better way of making VGA graphics work for me :-) BTW, what graphics hardware do you have in mind? Have you met some framebuffer graphics device coupled to an x86 CPU, that is not VGA compatible? Okay, I know the VGA compatibility can have glitches... If you did have some such VGA-incompliant graphics device, you might face other challenges, such as getting a Linux kernel framebuffer graphics driver for that, or direct support (driver) in SDL... Good luck with your DOSEMU mini-distro. I suggest that you include a bootloader option to boot plain DOS (FreeDOS?) straight on bare metal :-) Frank Rysanek -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-msdos" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
