[Xastir] Niggly bits to make it work

[James Ewen]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Curt, WE7U <curt.we7u at gmail.com> wrote:

> Don't take what he says lightly.

On the other hand, I've been stirring up a lot of nastiness lately, as
I seem to be in a foul mood recently...

I've been in an RTFM type of mood. Just a whole lot of people too lazy
to read the user manual, or the messages in the forum that they are a
member of, and asking stupid questions.

I spend a lot of time delving into the deep dark recesses of APRS. I'm
not all about the flashy maps... don't take that the wrong way either,
put a nice map display in front of me, and I start drooling. I also
like to see the dark and dirty bits under the hood too. The map is the
eye candy, but the raw packets show me how the network is performing.
Sparkly bits are nice, but I want the hard core stuff too.

Now I have to bow my head in shame... It's probably been over two
years since I had Xastir running. My laptop keeled over, and I've been
running the work laptop full time. I push things quite a bit by
installing UI-View, BalloonTrack, and other ham radio software on my
work computer. I have yet to push enough to install something like
Cygwin or a VMWare player on it.

I have installed Xastir on Ubuntu, and Windows via both VMWare, and
Cygwin in the past, and fiddled my way through all the niggly bits to
get it running. It was worth it to get the maps working. Especially
when I live in an area where there were virtually no maps available at
the time, but I had a shapefile of all the roads in Alberta. (We're
getting better now, especially since I've been playing with
OpenStreetMap, creating Open maps... hmm, I need an OSM to PocketMaps
converter!)

I really haven't been able to convince myself that I want to go
through all that again on my work machine just to run Xastir. If I'm
sitting in the office, I'm quite happy to use aprs.fi to see what's
happening around me. When I'm out mobile, my D710 and AvMap G5 give me
my window on the world.

It's really the amount of poking and prodding to get Xastir back up
and running that keeps me from having it running here. Although the
new Cygwin install walk through has gotten my interest piqued again.
The first Cygwin readme was exceptional... far too many steps for the
average user, but if you followed the instructions to the letter,
Xastir came up and worked. Getting it going on Ubuntu was much harder.

I'd like to think that I'm no dummy, but I also know that I am easily
annoyed by never ending error messages about this dependency, and that
dependency not being installed.

I get annoyed when I download a "free program" and install it only to
find out that the "free" part of the program was the download... if
you want it to work, you have to pay $60.

I guess it's just me and my cranky mood...

James
VE6SRV