[Ham-Linux] Which Distro/Apps/Apps development software to use?

[kd4e]

My personal preference is Puppy Linux, so called because it is very small
and very efficient with resources, but still amazingly complete and 
powerful.
The current version is 4.12 with 4.2 due out shortly.

There is also one called Woof which uses the drivers and application 
repository
of the wildly popular Ubuntu distro yet manages to remain tiny (the 
author of
Woof is the originator of Puppy).

Puppy may be booted from a CD (read-only or RW), DVD (read only or RW),
USB stick, or SD Card and run entirely in memory leaving nothing behind you
do not specifically choose to save to the HDD. (You may also install it 
to the HDD.)

The neat thing is that you can download Puppy and burn an ISO CD and test
it out on your computer to see how you like it - it is completely free.
http://www.puppylinux.com/

There are a number of Ham apps that already run under Puppy and the Forum
members are generally happy to port others already Linux-friendly over to
Puppy for you -- or you can fairly easily do it yourself.

CQRlog is one really valuable app, there are many many others.

HTH ... 73, doc KD4E

>  I have just finished putting together a computer for the shack. It is
>  a dual core AMD something or other with 1Gbyte of RAM and 250 GByte
>  ofSata HDD. I also have a soundblaster USB external sound “card” I
>  want to use as well. The mother board has onboard everything else I
>  think I need, and until the Gods of freecycle smile on me I’ll be
>  using an old SVSG CRT Old School monitor. Also it has many, many USB
>  ports and one serial port.
>
>
>
>  I am keen to work towards a “Linux only” shack system because I feel
>  that Linux is more in keeping with the spirit of ham Radio than
>  Windows which I have to use professionally as well as an OS/X Mac. I
>  am reasonably computer proficient and can work my way around shell
>  scripts and C Programs as well as COBOL and a load of other old skool
>  languages. (and no I don’t want a punch card reader either!). I am
>  also learning my way around Ruby and Joomla for what it’s worth and
>  C# under Vista.
>
>
>
>  The sorts of things I want to do are :-
>
>
>
>  Rig control – FT817, TS 570, Elecraft K2
>
>  Digital and weak signal modes – WSPR, PSK, QRSS, Morse. RTTY
>
>  SDR – I have a Softrock 9. Is there a linux equivalent of Power SDR?
>
>  Test equipment - Probably be building a VNA to Toms design in QEX,
>  use of the sound card as an AF generator and component tester,
>
>  AVR programming (probably using the Adruino board and Wiring which I
>  believe runs under Linux
>
>  Spice circuit simulation
>
>  Development of bespoke applications to run under, I guess, Gnome
>  and/or KDE in a high level language (e.g. C, Ruby)
>
>  Small scale web site development to document the above and act as a
>  “Lab Notebook”
>
>  Logging
>
>  Connect to the internet via wifi
>
>  Anything else you guys can come up with..
>
>
>
>  So the questions are :-
>
>
>
>  What distro should I use?
>
>  What applications should I use?
>
>  Is there a decent Applications Development environment that I can use
>  to develop GUI applications in either C or Ruby (or something
>  similar, but please, please, not assembler as I am not clever enough)
>
>
>
>
>  Sorry about the bandwidth – but I am sure someone out has figured it
>  all out before hand.
>
>
>
>  72 de Steve G0XAR
>
>
>


-- 

Thanks! & 73, doc, KD4E
FS/Swap/Wanted: http://kd4e.com/swapn.html
Free OS : http://www.PuppyLinux.com
Personal: http://kd4e.com
|_|___|_|
| | & | |
/\ {|
/ \ {|
/ \ {|
/ @ \ {|
| |~_|~~~~|
| -| | |
============\ # KD4E
Have an http://ultrafidian.com day!