My company has been in business for nearly thirty years, and we started with an IBM PC-XT and DisplayWrite 3 for typing & printing documents; later on, DW4 and WordPerfect. Consequently I have umpteen floppy disks - both 5-1/4 and 3-1/2 inch size, mostly DSDD - from which I'd like to recapture old project reports and correspondence for archival purposes.

I've gotten as far as being able to read the old 5-1/4 inch floppy disks, but until today, the only program I could find that would open those files is Adobe FrameMaker, itself in the ancient category and a trifle awkward.

The story about reading 5-1/4 inch floppies is here, on the trisquel users forum:
http://trisquel.info/en/forum/installation-fl … nfigure-problem
The story about Adobe FrameMaker is at the end of the same topic as above, where I installed it with the help of wine, a GNU/linux application.

In the process I tried using wine to install DisplayWrite, but wine insisted that I install DOSBox first, which I did. When I tried to use wine to run the setup.exe file in the first DisplayWrite floppy directory, it failed while trying to run DOSBox and told me a few tidbits about DOSBox in the process.

So I did some reading, learned enough to edit the DOSBox configuration file, and used DOSBox to set up the C ~/dosprogs file, which gave me the starting place for DisplayWrite: DW4V2. Then I got stuck on DOSBox's demand that I place the first DisplayWrite disk in the A: drive. Oops ... not connected. I had already gotten them into Trisquel's hard drive by another route. Then I applied a little old-school logic: That the DisplayWrite files aren't compressed, so I can simply copy and paste them from the four Disk0# directories into the DW4V2 directory.

Starting DOSBox again, I navigated to the DW4V2 directory, found the DW4.BAT file, and executed that. Bingo ! Off and running.

DisplayWrite 4 runs just fine under DOSBox without any help from wine.

The motherboard is an Intel D865GLC, with a Pentium 4 processor running at 400MHz, 2GB of RAM, and Trisquel 7 as the operating system. I shut off all the other stuff in the DOSBox config file, such as the sound card, MIDI, printer support, and so on. I'm just opening and saving files - already have most of the hard copies - just need a way of retrieving them from magnetic media, etc.

Is that awkward step with the A: drive handled any other way ?