We have a point-of-sale DOS application that I would like to run under Linux. Unfortuantely, both the DOSEmu and DOSBox emulators don't work (which is surprising because this app is pretty simple, I would think).

Since this app runs great from within any version of Windows, would it be possible to use VMWare to run Windows 9X, then launch this application?

Thanks for any input!

You can try it.

VMWare runs windows. Not knowing what this app is I can't say for sure.

I went to VMWare's site and they allow for a free 30-day trial. I installed it along with Windows ME and the DOS app appears to work fine. If I can get everything networked, this may very well be the answer.

VMWare is some pretty slick software. Very impressive.

You can network the linux host and do masquerading for windows.

You need to setup the network interface as NAT

The setup configuration at the beginning asks, and it will setup the interfaces as well as samba for host file sharing. Everything is setup as you run the setup script, no other configuration should be needed.

ifconfig...


vmnet1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:56:C0:00:01
inet addr:172.16.174.1 Bcast:172.16.174.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::250:56ff:fec0:1/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:274 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

vmnet8 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:50:56:C0:00:08
inet addr:172.16.12.1 Bcast:172.16.12.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::250:56ff:fec0:8/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:112 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:255 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)


c:\Documents and Settings\david>ipconfig > d:\shared\ipinfo


david@zeus:/data/Windows XP Professional/Shared> cat ipinfo

Windows IP Configuration


Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : localdomain
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 172.16.12.130
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 172.16.12.2

My dialup service has the high speed dialup compression stuff, and that works through the linux host too if you interested in that.

I don't use windows much for browsing but it's there if you want it.

Ummm...

VMWare on Linux works great for running a DOS virtual machine. You don't need a version of Windows in there also, just load DOS. Your POS software may also have its own memory manager, so running Windows in there too may give your application a headache.

I noticed that it did allow for a virtual DOS-only set up. Very cool, but I have NO idea how to set up DOS to work on a Windows network. So I'm just running Win95 to launch the POS software. Very funny, running 3 OSes underneath each other.