ETYMO goes Linux... ;-)

First of all: yes, it IS a pitty that ETYMO has not been written directly under LINUX... But for all you freaks out there: don't forget that there are still a lot of people who - let's say - do not have the chance to work with such a good operating system. ;-) ETYMO has therefore been written for the still most popular operating system: Windows.

Nonetheless, you can run ETYMO und LINUX using the MS-DOS-emulater DOSEMU. Follow the steps below for an easy installation / configuration of DOSEMU.

HOW TO: STEP BY STEP

IMPORTANT NOTE (added on June 2011): Since version 0.7 (or so) DOSEMU blocks the "zero pointers" generated by the DJGPP-Compiler with which ETYMO was built. Fortunately, DOSEMU offers a compatibility mode to overcome this error. Just make sure the file /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf contains the line

$_ignore_djgpp_null_derefs = (1)

and everything should work fine! (I have been runnig ETYMO on OpenSuSE 11.4 on a VirtualBox running on Mac OS X 10.5.8 and all the calculations worked astonishingly well ...:-))
As for the rest: stay hungry, stay foolish ... as somebody said! :-)

INSTALL DOSEMU
If you don't have installed DOSEMU yet get it from ftp://ftp.dosemu.org/pub/dosemu/
Follow the instructions given there.
SETUP DPMI-MEMORY
In order to use DOSEMU with ETYMO you need to modify the configuration file (either /etc/dosemu.conf if you use ETYMO as root or /.dosemurc for a simple user). ETYMO needs a DPMI (Dos Protected Mode Interface) to be installed. By default, the DPMI-option of DOSEMU is disabled. To enable it, change the line
$_dpmi = (off) # in Kbyte
to
$_dpmi = (20000) # ... or whatever
DOSEMU comes with FreeDOS (stored in /var/lib/dosemu/dosC). You could now copy ETYMO to the same directory and try to use it. The problem with that is, that FreeDOS cannot write directly to LINUX-harddisks (there is one exception: if you have a complete partition you can acces with FreeDOS only. In this case, the partition may not be mounted by LINUX! Read DOSEMU documentaton for that). So, you would only be able to use ETYMO in an interactive mode: no corpus calculation would be possible (since ETYMO needs to write the results to the harddisk) and you would not be able to save the results of the interactive calculations neither.
To get around this problem, you must use a disk-image file. If you just want to use ETYMO for a few calculations with not too much data, you can just use the disk-image file (hdimage.test) shipped with DOSEMU. Copy it first:
cd /var/lib/dosemu/
cp hdimage.test etymoimage
Now, in the directory ./drives you have to create a symbolic link to the disk-image
cd /var/lib/dosemu/drives
ln -snf /var/lib/dosemu/etymoimage d
Since you will need to copy ETYMO to the image-file, create also a link to ETYMO
ln -snf /where/your/etymo/is e
Now, start DOSEMU
dos
(If it doesn't work, try to run DOSEMU as root)
You now have three drives:
C:                the system files (read-only)
D:                a copy of the hdimage.test file (read-write)
E:                the files belonging to ETYMO (read-only)
Since we just made a copy of hdimage.test, the file contains the system files shipped with DOSEMU. In order to have more free disk space for the programme, change to drive D and delete the files:
D:
del *.*
You now have about 1,2 MByte for calculations with ETYMO. In order to run the program, copy it E:
D:
copy E:\etymo.exe
copy E:\rules.txt
copy E:\corpus.txt
etc.
and run it
etymo

Everything should work fine now. If it doesn't, try to modify the amount of DPMI-memory. If you would like to have more free disk-space for the calculations, read the DOSEMU-documentation about how to create empty image-files.