dosemu

I've been helping my dad moving his files from an old MS-DOS based 386 to a newer Athlon Thunderbird running Ubuntu. One of the issues I encountered was the fact that the old Lotus Symphony files couldn't properly be opened by OpenOffice.org Calc. So I had to find another solution: dosemu.

Salvaging the old files (from the old 100MB harddisk):
# dd if=/dev/hdc1 of=~/olddiskpart1
# mount -o loop -t vfat ~/olddiskpart1 /mnt/tmp
# cp -R /mnt/tmp* /var/lib/dosemu/msdos
# chmod -R 777 /var/lib/dosemu/msdos

A reference to the old files (in /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf):
$_hdimage = "msdos"

A couple of essential printer settings (in /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf):
$_printer = "DeskJet-3820"
$_printer_command = "lpr -l"
$_printer_timeout = (20)

And the legacy application worked like a charm!