running ProcommPlus on linux
running ProcommPlus on linux
If you need a good comm program and you miss using Procomm Plus,
or you need terminal emulation from linux, and Minicom just doesn't
cut it. Then here's what you can do to get the DOS version of Procomm Plus
running on your linux system.
Many linux distributions come with dosemu
, the DOS emulator for linux. This program can be easily setup to run most
of your favourite DOS applications including Procomm Plus. The following
shows the steps necessary to do this quickly and easily.
I'd very much welcome any comments.
For starters, you're going to need to download dosemu from www.dosemu.org and install it. Assuming that you are this far already, just start the emulator by typing 'dosemu' or 'xdosemu' if you're in X-windows. One thing it does need is a working image of DOS to boot from. Since version 1.1.5, the dosemu script should take care of setting this up for you, the first time you run it by asking if you want to setup a bootable DOS drive, this is where dosemu will bootup from when it starts.
The other way, would be to make a directory under /var/lib/dosemu and call it 'msdos' and copy the files necessary to boot dos into that directory. If you do it this way, then you would have to change the following line in your dosemu.conf file to point to your msdos directory, otherwise you don't need it and you should comment this line out.
$_hdimage = "msdos"
While you're at it, you might want to take a look through this config file and change whatever you think is appropriate such as your floppy drives, COM port your modem is on, etc. Just to be on the safe side, avoid setting the mouse or any other peripherals at this stage since it may cause a conflict. You'll have to eventually change these settings as well:
$_term_char_set = "ibm"
$_term_color = "on"
Also, these are recommended:
$_rawkeyboard = "1"
$_speaker = "emulated"
$_hogthreshold = "0"
$_X_title = "Procomm Plus"
$_X_icon_name = "Procomm Plus"
Now try to start dosemu and see what you get, you may want to edit your autoexec.bat and you should be able to remove the config.sys as well. You'll notice that if your harddrive is partitioned with DOS, then you can't access it, this can be changed with the following line in your autoexec.bat assuming your dos partition is mounted under /mnt/c:
lredir.exe d: linux\fs\mnt\c
With this, D drive will be your DOS partition and you can try running your applications from there. If you don't have a DOS partition then just copy your pcplus directory in your DOS boot directory and you will be able to simply run it from there, you can even set the autoexec to start Procomm Plus automatically. Another way to have Procomm Plus run from a single command is to start dosemu with the -I option like this:
dosemu -I 'keystroke "cd\\pcplus\rpcplus\r"'
Using ASPECT
Aspect seems to work perfectly, I haven't had any problems running or compiling it, and virtually ALL Procomm Plus features are 100% functional! Procomm Plus also offers a command parameter that automatically starts an ASPECT script, you could use this in the autoexec.bat, or in a single command to start dosemu if you wanted to use Procomm for a single dedicated purpose. To start Procomm like this, type:
pcplus /ffilename
notice that there is no space between /f and the filename. The filename has to be a valid aspect script.
The only problem i've noticed with Procomm Plus, is a divide
by 0 error for CPU's that are faster that 200Mhz. There is a work
around for this with a patch,
or you can just download the patched version from here.
Also there is a list
of all downloads for everything procomm plus related.
Screen Snapshots
Links
Using WordPerfect for DOS on linux
