X11 forwarding problem

I am using WordPerfect 5.1 under Mandrake 9.0, using FREEDOS and DOSEMU. It works beautifully, and notwithstanding earlier comments that not too many people seem to be interested in Dosemu anymore, it is _absolutely essential_ for me, and ultimately, I hope for my entire office (a small law firm of 12 people) as I switch us over (slowly) to Linux.

Whatever happens, we will continue to use WordPerfect 5.1 for the foreseeable future. It is simply _massively_ faster than anything else that could replace it. So WordPerfect is fundamental to our business, and therefore so is DOS support.

Now my problem. WordPerfect works perfectly under Dosemu when run on a machine locally - ie when typing at the same machine that WordPerfect/Dosemu is running on. However, when I run WordPerfect/Dosemu over SSH using X11 forwarding from a remote computer, the session crashes and disappears immediately whenever I switch video modes by doing a print preview. Everything else works through SSH unless and until I do the print preview.

The print preview switches video modes, and while Dosemu handles this flawlessly on the local machine, something about the X11 forwarding is killing the whole session.

Does anyone know why this is killing the Dosemu session across SSH, but not locally? I have fiddled with various video settings in dosemu.conf, but nothing seems to help. Is there a way to fix it?

Hugh Campbell
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

the only option that *might* fix it but I'm not at all sure is $_X_mitshm = (on)
try to set that to (off), to force it not to use MIT shared memory extensions that speed up xdosemu on local machines.

Bart