Re: DosEMU, Ghost: VGA screen garbled...

[Bart Oldeman <bartoldeman@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Frantisek Rysanek
<Frantisek.Rysanek@post.cz> wrote:
> I thought I didn't need "-s" if I was logged in as root (because I
> noticed that that way, DOSEMU asks for /usr/bin/sudo). This is not
> entirely true, there's more to "-s" than just the sudo. It
> effectively tells DOSEMU "don't be shy, feel free to do all the stuff
> that you need the root privileges for".

exactly. It's just a way to avoid running "dosemu" as root and
accidentally crashing the system because direct hardware access
doesn't work.

By the way, it looks like with KMS (kernel modesetting) direct console
graphics can't work: VGA text mode is entirely unsupported then. I
will see about adding a check for that.

> -V looks like a "video mode sanitizer", can't say if it has any
> effect in my case or not...

-V just does the same thing as setting "$_graphics=(1)", i.e. the
switch has no effect if $_graphics is already set that way.

> -d = "detach". I can see that the dosemu command returns to the shell
> immediately, but only after it has "forked a demon", that in turn
> attaches to the first free virtual console. It also switches you
> straight to the newly picked console that dosemu has attached to, so
> you don't quite notice, until you try switching consoles using
> CTRL+ALT+Fx :-)

Yes, it works like X that way.

Thanks for your patch for wholedisk. I adjusted it a bit also after
reading a bit of Linux fdisk source code: just unconditionally ignore
the cylinder value from HDIO_GETGEO and compute it instead. In fact
HDIO_GETGEO gives bogus info so I changed it to look at the MBR as
well to determine CHS limits. It's now in SVN.

Bart