A while back I posted a howto on booting your floppy image with dosemu. I've since discovered that dosemu sucks pretty hard and qemu is much better.

Here is the entirety of my "booting a floppy image with qemu howto":

And there you have it ....

If you've started on the homework for Cpts 460, you've no doubt discovered by now that the bcc compiler sucks little tiny hamster nuts.

The package from the CptS 460 homepage installs over system files, so instead of using it, you should install the package that comes with your distribution. It may be called bcc (Ubuntu) or dev86 (Gentoo) or something similar.

If you have issues with that, you can always go straight to the source and compile it yourself. The homepage for bcc is here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robert.debath/

I don't have a computer with a floppy drive. This makes it a bit difficult to just dd my image to a floppy and boot from it. I spent the time setting up dosemu and figuring out how to boot from it. Don't feel bad if you didn't get it working. Yes, there is a trick to it that wasn't mentioned in class.

The first step is to install and configure dosemu. Use your system package manager for this. Once you can start xdosemu and see a DOS bootscreen, you can go to the next step.

Several people have noticed that Ubuntu does not come with a development environment. Well, fear not! Adding software is simple and there's even several pretty nice IDEs to choose from.

First, follow the steps on this web page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com//AddingRepositoriesHowto

Second, use the package manager to install build-essential, which should pull in gcc, gdb, ddd. Then if you want an IDE, install either anjuta or kdevelop

If you'd like to use Eclipse for 223, there's a howto here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EclipseIDE

As always, post comments if you have any questions.

• Kdbg
• KDbg is a graphical user interface to gdb, the GNU debugger. It provides an intuitive interface for setting breakpoints, inspecting variables, and stepping through code.
• ddd
• GNU DDD is a graphical front-end for command-line debuggers such as GDB, DBX, WDB, Ladebug, JDB, XDB, the Perl debugger, or the Python debugger. Besides "usual'' front-end features such as viewing source texts, DDD has become famous through its interactive graphical data display, where data structures are displayed as graphs.