SDL without X (dosbox on console of old notebook)

Question

I am trying to run dosbox on low memory (512MB - 32MB video RAM) notebook without x windows for fun. It's not working out of the box and I am getting "can't init SDL no available video device" error.

Dosbox usse SDL for rendering and according to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159267 it seems that it's somehow possible to run SDL on fbcon, directfb or svgalib.

The problem is that I am unable to select videodriver through the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment variable. There should be list of video devices that are tested during the SDL startup so maybe I am just unable to install required libs.

Framebuffer itself seems to work since I was able to display image using fbi image viewer (but only as the root, although the user I was trying on is member of the same group as the /dev/fb0)

Am I doing something fundamentally wrong with the dosbox or SDL configuration or is there other way for running dosbox without X windows?

BTW: I am running freshly installed and fully updated Fedora 23 i386.

Answer 1

The Fedora SDL package isn't compiled with directfb support. I think you'll have to rebuild it (or build a completely separate local version in /usr/local or /opt) in order to get what you want. See this bug report (although dosbox uses SDL instead of SDL2).

To do this, you just need to add --enable-video-directfb to the SDL ./configure line when building.