DOSBox for Mageia Linux

Mageia7 does provide a pre-compiled package for DOSBox, but does not provide any graphical frontend for it. Since DOSBox may typically need special configurations for specific application, a GUI frontend is handy for managing these configuration files.

DBoxFE is available; version 0.1.3.0 dated 21 September 2007 is the most current. Both 32-bit and 64-bit RPM packages are available as well as a win32 version. This installs on Mageia7 with only a warning about the package being unsigned.

When launched, the following screen displays.

You must create a Profile (here named "Basic") and also provide the path to the dosbox executable ( /usr/bin/dosbox, in the Preferences tab). The named configuration files are kept at ~/.dboxfe

Once configured, select the appropriate profile and click Start.

But what about configuring DOSBox itself? The default configuration file is found at ~.dosbox/ and named dosbox-0.74.conf. It is well commented and provides a set of sane defaults. Additional details can be found at the DOSBox Wiki. The job of DBoxFE is to create individual config files and launch DOSBox with those.

There is no GUI for two more important areas: Where your DOS "drives" are mounted and what the contents of the autoexec.bat file are to be (which include the mount instructions).

DOSBox is intended to provide a DOS environment to run DOS games, not non-game applications and so may lack support for some functions needed by non-game applications. To run those applications, vDos and vDosPlus are better choices, but are limited to running on Windows platforms.

UPDATE - 2021
A better option might be DOSBox-X, an Open-Source DOS emulator that supports Windows 3.x and Windows 9x and ME. Check out the WIKI for details.

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