Use a Dos DOOR with dosemu on a headless server

Question

I'm trying to setup a BBS with DOS DOOR games using doesemu on fedora20.

So far:

-the bbs is running just fine

-the dos doors run fine

-the bbs is able to open a dos door with dosemu (if the following conditions are met)

The problem: If I'm not logged in to the server with a separate ssh console with X forwarding enabled as the user that runs the bbs the door fails to start. The reported error is that there is no display. How in the world can i present a "display" when no one is logged into a headless server.

Answer 1

Use a virtual X server (Xvfb). It will provide a display to the application, so it can happily draw in there, but will not show the image on any hardware.

You could also run Xvnc instead, so you would still have (physical) access to the BBS software. In those days, not everything was remote-configurable.