I have found myself in an institution that only uses Windows products for its classes. Most of them i could handle with their Linux alternatives but i had a little
problem with BASIC. I was faced with two choices at first, to install Wine for BASIC or install VirtualBox where i can virtually run Windows. Then i talked to Odzangba, who adviced i get an open-source IDE for BASIC. I took the idea but first, i googled my predicament i found out that i could use dosbox, which emulates the old DOS environment, to run BASIC and it works marvellous. This is how i managed it;
- In the terminal, i run “sudo aptitude install dosbox“. This installed dosbox on on my Ubuntu machine.
- Then i run “wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/win95upg/tool_s/1.0/w95/en-us/olddos.exe“.
- Next i opened my home directory, right-click the olddos.exe file. Extracted it into a folder, I later renamed it QBasic.
I was ready to start writting my BASIC Codes, i just had to type dosbox in the terminal to run the emulator.
To run basic, i had to mount the folder as drive C: in the emulator. To do this i typed the following, again, in the terminal in order.
mount c /home/machel/BASIC/
c:
Qbasic.exe
remember to replace machel in /home/machel/BASIC to your username. Now, coding begins.
- But soon, i got tired of typing the last set of commands everytime i wanted to run BASIC, so i went back online i found out that i could edit the dosbox conf file to suit me. So, in the terminal, i typed “sudo nano /home/machel/.dosbox/dosbox-0.73.conf“. At the end of the file, i added the following lines;
“mount c /home/machel/BASIC/
c:
Qbasic.exe “
Now, all i have to type in the terminal is dosbox and voila, Basic also loaded for me. Isn’t that so sweeeeeeeeeeet!
sorry, i have to go, its time to code in BASIC. 
