1.2.0 binary install

[Jan Willem Stumpel <jstumpel@planet.nl>]

The install from source works beautifully. I love dosemu; I think
the developers are great people, very helpful and responsive. This
surely must be one of the best projects in the free software world.

But I would like to have dosemu available to dummies, a.k.a.
ordinary users.

I tried out the binary install. First, very thoroughly, I removed
all previous installations of dosemu, freedos, and the dosemu fonts.

Then I downloaded from www.dosemu.org

dosemu-1.2.0-bin.tgz
dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz

A) I did what README.bindist says.

$mkdir mydos
$cd mydos
$tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz
tar (child): dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz: Cannot open: No such file or
directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Oops. The tarball should have been moved into ~/mydos first. This
is obvious, but not obvious to dummies.

B)
$cd
$cd mydos
$mv ../dose*z .

Again we follow the instructions in README.bindist:

$tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz
tar (child): dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz: Cannot open: No such file or
directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Ahh.. the name of the file is different. Why, BTW? We should
rename it, according to the dosemu.org homepage, when we compile
from source. But we are using the binary distribution!

C) Third attempt

$tar -zxf dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz
$tar -zxf dosemu-1.2.0-bin.tgz

This works. BTW why -zxf instead of vzxf? The v option gives some
reassuring feedback to users.

$ cd mydos

$ ./xdosemu
ERROR: X: Unable to open font "vga"ERROR: , trying "vga"...
ERROR: X: Unable to open font "vga"ERROR: , trying "9x15"...

And an x-dosemu window opens using an X terminal font. The binary
install can´t do the xset trick for including Xfonts in the font
path.

The same, of course, happens if you do NOT create a subdir called
mydos. The dosemu-bin and dosemu-freedos packages can also just be
unpacked from ~ (where the Ordinary User normally downloads it),
with all the stuff ending up in ~/dosemu. So why mydos?

Of course these problems are trivial for reasonably sophisticated
users. But many ordinary users just give up. Can´t we *at the very
least* provide some instructions which, if followed to the letter,
make the software work? Isn´t this worth some effort?

Regards, Jan

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