PCLinuxOS - Playing those DOS games in Linux

At home my elder brother still uses an old i386 PC though he has a brand new Compaq. That i386 machine has a history - it was the first PC ever in my village and it was the first machine on which I laid my hands on. I learned those nitty DOS commands on it. It’s aged more than 15 years old now, but still functional.

My 10 year old nephew, Sonu will be visiting me at Delhi on 13th of October. He is an avid games freak. Each time he called me on phone he reminded me to load some games - mainly those age-old DOS games that he plays on the i386 - paratrooper, aliens, antactic, blocks, mario, digger, ace speeder, dangerous road etc.


I was in a difficult situation "how can I install those DOS games on my PCLinuxOS 2007 machine, a brand new VIA-Intel hybrid PC?". I browsed forums, googled for a while, punched the keywords "linux dos games", "how to play dos games in pclinuxos, linux" etc. And then got search results related to Wine and DOSemu. Installed those packaged from PCLinuxOS repository through synaptic. And I am there, I could play almost all those games.

(For a wholesome knowledge of DOSemu, please refer this great guide: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DOSEMU-HOWTO.html. This guide will help you how to emulate any DOS applications in Linux.)


Now I can understand, DOS games are not that bad, except for their graphics. Even I could not pass 3 levels of Ace Speeder and Dangerous Road. Alas! If I could know about these software earlier!

PCLinuxOS - Some Great Linux Links and other web resources

http://tldp.org/ : The most usable and master Linux Documentation portal. Nowhere under the sun there is any guide as detailed, as comprehensive and as pure as http://tldp.org . Here you will find howtos, guides, man pages and an online magazine. No hanky panky, only pure information.

http://www.slackware.com/ : Simple is beautiful, that is slackware linux. People use mandriva, pclinuxos, ubuntu, fedora…. to use linux, but they use slackware to master linux. If pclinuxos is the big daddy of desktop linux, slackware is the great grand daddy of everything linux. There is a famous link http://www.slackbook.org/html/book.html , read it to know the ins and outs of linux.

http://www.linux.org/ : The official linux online. It offers applications (source packages), information on distributions and downloads to famous linux, books and all. You will get real big linux news here.

http://distrowatch.com/ : All about linux distributions, their rankings, updates, releases, news and all that. The best resource for linux hobbyists.

Not Linux related but interesting anyway

http://www.firsteuropa.com : As you can not do without a car, you can not ignore car insurance. So, why not book your insurance at First Europa and save big money? First Europa is a leading insurance brokerage in Europe. It is growing to spread across the globe like wildfire. Next time you think of buying an insurance visit first europa to save big money on your insurance policy.

http://www.alistapart.com/ : The veteran website on content, design and e-marketing. As they say - “from pixels to prose, coding to content.” It has them all. Besides, those designing, content and marketing, if you wish to hone your writing skills, just read a few article at ALA (alistapart).

PCLinuxOS - My Experience with amaroK

Last night I had a problem - I messed up my good-old xmms.

The default PCLinuxOS in my system had amaroK, the versatile music player in Linux World built for KDE. But I rarely used it for several reasons of which the most painful is “slow startup and response.” My favorite is XMMS, the darling of every music lover who has been using Linux for past couple of years.

At 1:30 last night, I was working on a friend’s project and a wild idea struck me, “how about removing amaroK as my chore is done through XMMS।” The next moment I opened synaptic and completely removed amaroK।

Sad... half an hour later I ran XMMS and lo… it’s gui opened but it could not play any media player. Then came the loop of installation and removal. I removed XMMS and libXMMS and did a fresh installation again through synaptic so as to resolve all the dependencies. But that never worked again.

If you are reading this blog. Please try it at home and if you are able to fix this problem, please let me know.

As for now I am happy with Kaffeine, it plays both audio files and video files.