DOSEMU success story

[Dave Williams <ronin@aristotle.net>]

  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".