MaxThink for DOS Running On Linux

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Posted by Buckeye Marksman
Apr 23, 2012 at 07:51 PM

I now have MaxThink 89 for DOS running as an almost native app on Linux.

Here’s what you do:

Install the dosemu package for your distro (if not already installed).

Make a directory named max hanging off your home directory as follows:

mkdir ~/max

Copy all your MT files into this directory (MAX.EXE, MESSAGES.MT, CONFIG89.MT, etc).

Put the following into your .bashrc file:

alias max=“dosemu ~/max/MAX.EXE”

Load the new alias for the first time:

source ~/.bashrc

Now you can use MaxThink to manipulate Linux text files. You may want to look at other Linux helper apps like expand, unexpand, dos2unix and unix2dos. For example, to convert a MaxThink file with leading spaces into something that can be loaded into the Hierarchical NoteBook (hnb) or Vim Outliner, do the following:

unexpand—tabs=1 file.mt > file.otl

Don’t know about you, but I am a happy camper :-)

Posted by Buckeye Marksman
Apr 25, 2012 at 02:16 PM

Well, I’ve discovered a couple of limiting factors while running the DOS version of MaxThink on Linux. One is that MaxThink defaults to my ~/max folder instead of my current working directory. So, all input and output must reside there. Another challenge is MaxThink for DOS is not Y2K compliant. It currently thinks this is the year 112.

I’ve managed to work out some of the similar issues with the Perm decision tree builder by putting a DOS batch file in the directory where I’m working. The batch file is as follows:

PERM.EXE %1 %2 %3 %4
pause

I named this batch file runperm.bat, and invoke by adding the following to my ~/.bashrc file:

alias perm=‘dosemu runperm.bat’

Hope this information is of some use.

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