[Elecraft] ANN: KComm 1.1 released

[Brendan Minish]

Hello Dave

I am a linux professional who might need a bit more time on Solaris.. 

I have an eeePC and love it to bits.

The Stock Xandros distro is very good for someone who just wants to 'do
stuff' It's well put together and really integrates networking and
wireless, even the support for 3G dongles is well integrated and dead
easy to configure.
Build quality is good.
My Wife took an instant shine to it, so much so that she bought her own
one! This is saying quite a lot because She has completely avoided
computers up until now. 

However the stock distro, to me felt very limiting, you can configure it
to have a normal menu and add standard debian repositories etc. Once you
have done that it's a bit more usable.

 I am, however not a debian fan so I moved the eeePc's default
distribution to a 4G flash card ( for dual boot) and installed Redhat
Fedora8 on the internal hard disk with the xfce desktop (it's much
lighter than KDE or Gnome). with a little bit of tweaking this works
flawlessly, I will shortly be installing Fedora 9 which ships with eeePC
support 

it's fast enough to do pretty much anything I throw at it, the keyboard
is acceptable for it's size. For a systems admin having a small portable
machine that can do things like openVPN and SSH is fantastic

About the only limitation is the screen size, some X apps will not
resize small enough to fit on the screen. Quite often this seems to be
simply down to programmers who think no one would ever want to resize
that small even though the program has plenty of 'room' left to shrink.
This seems to be a particular problem with some of the ham radio apps.
A work around is that the oversize programs can be dragged around a
larger virtual desktop by holding ALT then dragging with the mouse. 
It's not that big a deal but the 901 (with the bigger screen and larger
HD ) is on my want list once they are shipping in quantity 

 The state of linux ham radio software is still a bit disappointing in
some areas but it is improving. The killer app for me would be a full
featured, award tracking logging program that used a mySQL database back
end. 
it would be even neater if there was an agreed, extensible SQL database
format that multiple logging packages could share. Handing a log with
nearly 20,000 QSO's in it is most efficiently done by a database app not
a flat file format based app.
This would also allow for software to share the logging data between
multiple programs. 
For example Contest logger could the same database as the normal logger,
the integrated logger in the digimodes program(s), the VHF Grid square
tracking logger and the ADIF import/export program.  

For this to occur there needs to be a lot more dialogue and ideas
sharing between developers of open source ham radio software. 

DJ1YFK has written a nice simple logger that ticks some of my boxes, as
well as some other nifty programs 
http://fkurz.net/ham/

Those interested in Linux ham radio software development might also be
interested in the IRC channel dedicated to this on freenode
http://freenode.net/
#hamradio
and for fedora users there is 
#fedora-hams 
where work is underway to include much more ham radio software support
to the next fedora distribution.  

73
Brendan EI6IZ 
RHCE #805008029731335
 

On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 01:35 +0100, David Ferrington, M0XDF wrote:
> Thanks
> I'd like to avoid XP, mostly because I'm a Unix professional who needs  
> a bit more time on Linux (I'm mostly Solaris)
> 
> I've seen a colleagues Eee PC 701 and wondered, but I'd like to spend  
> less, so was thinking of the 4G (701)
> 
> any thought's most welcome
> 73 de M0XDF, K3 #174

-- 
Don‘t complain. Nobody will understand. Or care. And certainly don‘t try
to fix the situation yourself. It‘s dangerous. Leave it to a highly
untrained, unqualified, expendable professional.