[Xastir] Digipeating

[Tapio Sokura]

hasan schiers wrote:
> was done in the TNC. Eeeuuchh! That is not an acceptable solution for me. No
> tnc hardware does a good job of smart digipeating, and besides that, I'm not
> interested in buying new TNCs.

I'd say UIDIGI and KPC-3(+) with recent enough firmwares are quite smart 
what comes to APRS digipeating. And certainly more reliable than a PC. 
Ok, a run-of-the-mill TNC with standard firmware is not that ideal for 
an APRS digipeater.

I guess Xastir is here adhering to the traditional unix thinking of 
having one program for one purpose and doing that well. Since there 
already are perfectly good APRS digipeaters for Linux, such as aprsdigi 
and digi_ned, why duplicate the effort? Usability from the user point of 
view could be one reason.

> 1. Will Xastir and digi-NED run side-by side on the same machine? How does
> Xastir interface to digi-NED, or does it not do that? I am so used to having

If you use the Linux kernel AX.25 stack, you can run as many AX.25 
programs as you like side by side and there will be no problems with 
having just one TNC. When using the kernel AX.25 stack the kernel does 
all the talking to the TNC. The programs talk to the kernel when they 
want access to AX.25 devices instead of directly going for the serial port.

   Tapio