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Installling DOSemu On Modern Linux Systems

It is possible to install DOSemu using a patch that a friend of mine created for DOSemu to prevent the segmentation faults that occur using DOSemu without being patched. I tried dosemu2 but had no success. I setup DOSemu under Devuan Linux 4.0 (Chimera) but the directions should work with minor modifications on any Linux distro (I hope). I compiled for a default install.

NOTE: This code is old (but working!) and the documentation is outdated. Unless you really need DOSemu for some special reason, I recommend using DOSbox as it is usually packaged by all the major distros and is much, MUCH better documented than DOSemu. I learned all of this the hard way!

I do not and cannot offer support on installing DOSemu! You are on your own.

Here's the steps to get this done:

1. You will need to run the following command to install necessary dependencies:
   
   apt install build-essential git libslang2-dev xaw3dg-dev libsdl-console libsdlconsole-dev


2. In your home directory, run this command:
   
   git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/dosemu/code dosemu


3. Download the following files into your new dosemu directory:
   •  FreeDOS image (if you are not using another DOS for your interpreter): Make sure to rename it to dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz so DOSemu will see it during its compiling. DO not extract the archive! DOSemu will do the work for you.
   •  A patch that fixes segfaults in the DOSemu code: Once copied to your dosemu directory, simply extract it using this command: tar xf dosemu-segfault-fix.tgz. The patch, written by my friend Michael Dillon, will be installed into the DOSemu source code tree correctly. Why this patch? The shortcut command "sysctl -w vm.mmap_min_addr=0" trick doesn't work on all systems and the patch fixes this correctly in the source code.
   
   
4. Run these commands in sequence:
1. ./configure
2. make
3. sudo make install
   
   NOTE: you'll see a LOT of information displayed. If you want to read it, you can run this command: ./configure && make && sudo make install | tee output.txt and the output of all three commands will be written to a file called output.txt in the current directory.


5. If all is successful, DOSemu will give some additional information for you then you'll be returned to a prompt. From there, type xdosemu and you should see a DOSemu window open. To exit the emulator, type exitemu.

Stuck? Try here for some documentation.