Begin on linux

From BeginWiki

Here is a quick "how to" get the old school Begin games running on linux. This covers Begin 1.65 and 2, I've not tried the new Begin 3, it probably won't work like this. These instructions detail how to do this on Ubuntu 9.04, they should also work on other Debian based distributions (i.e. Debian, Mint, etc). Other distros will probably differ mainly only in installation of dosbos. If you are having problems with ANY distro, please ask, I can probably help.

Download either BEGIN165.ZIP or begin2.zip from the file section of the Begin Yahoo group. Unzip the file to your home directory, usually you just need to right click the .zip file and pick "unzip here" or something similar. Install dosbox: Either;

1. use Synaptic (under System --> Administration --> Synaptic Package Manager), search for "dosbox", follow the prompts to install.

or (if you're comfortable with the command line)

2. launch a terminal session (Applications --> Accessories --> Terminal), type one line at a time (enter after), letting the computer do it's thing in between;
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install dosbox

the 'sudo' part is "superuser do", essentially means 'run as administrator', it should ask you for your password. These commands will update your computer's knowledge of current programs (apt-get update), install the current version of any software you already have (apt-get upgrade), then install the current version of DosBox. It will probably ask you if its OK to install some other programs, give it permission to do so.

Now that Dosbox is installed, fire it up by starting a terminal (see above) type "dosbox" then enter. You should wind up with a window that has "Welcome to DOSBox v..." and ending with a "Z:\>" prompt, just like the good old days.

To get Dosbox in fullscreen hit alt-enter Type;

mount c /home/YOUR_USER/BEGIN_DIR

"YOUR_USER" is your home directory (or where ever you extracted the begin zip to) and BEGIN_DIR is the directory it extracted to, my actual command was;

mount c /home/begbie/begin2

That command mounted your begin directory to Dosbox's c: drive. So, type

c:
dir

and you should get a listing of the directory. Look for the .exe file (in my case BEGIN2.EXE), type in "begin2.exe", and you should have a working Begin game! To exit Dosbox, exit out of begin, then type "exit" from the 'DOS' prompt.

Any questions, comments or criticisms are welcome.