[ale] DOSBox Printing

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2010-08-22 at 16:32 -0400, PairOfTwins wrote:
> An elderly client is REALLY unwilling to use a mouse, and is
> concerned 
> that 20 year old DOS system will die.
> 
> DOSBox appears to run that precious mailing list program fine, but 
> printing is not officially supported yet.  The unofficial MegaBuild 
> version appears to be aimed at Windoze users, as several dll files
> are 
> needed.
> 
> I'd imagined a Linux PC (with USB support!) that would automatically 
> launch DOSbox which would launch the program, and the user could just 
> get to work, but how to print???
> 
> FreeDOS would likely work, but if DOSBox could print to a file,
> couldn't 
> some Linux program spot that new file and send it to the printer? 

I would use something like KVM (advantage is that all modern systems
support it, and is built into the kernel and just needs the KVM userland
utilities to be installed); then you can use the -serial command to
emulate a serial port device---and kvm will let you connect it to a
serial or parallel port on the host, as well as to a file, stdio, a
pipe, a pty, or a TCP/UDP port, or all sorts of other things.  See "man
kvm" on a system that has the KVM userland utilities (on Ubuntu, install
qemu-kvm).

All you would need to do is provide a .desktop file that they can click
on to start the whole thing up, and they can "power off" their DOS
system inside of KVM by closing the window at the same points where they
are used to shutting off their hardware box.

	--- Mike