[Xastir] IBM Thinkpads and Xastir-Problems and fixes

[Bob Poirier]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Curt Mills" <archer at eskimo.com>
To: "Bob Poirier" <poirier at wyoming.com>
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: where's my tnc?? (fwd)


> 
> Forwarding what I sent to you before.  Had to wait until I was at
> home to look through my archives.
> 
> -- 
> Curt, WE7U. archer at eskimo dot com
> http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
>   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
> Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
> The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 07:55:28 -0800 (PST)
> From: "Curt, WE7U" <archer at eskimo.com>
> To: Bob Poirier <poirier at wyoming.com>
> Cc: "Curt Mills, WE7U" <archer at eskimo.com>
> Subject: Re: where's my tnc??
> 
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Bob Poirier wrote:
> 
> > My wife thinks she's a widow.  I have been fighting installing
> > Mandrake 9.2 on a Thinkpad 380XD laptop along with Xastir for the
> > better part of two months.  Everything is finally working fine
> > with the exception of my Crystal sound chip (Festival is not
> > compiled). I'm not too concerned about this, but what is driving
> > me nuts is I can't seem to get Xastir to "talk" to my KPC-3+. I'm
> > running 1.2.0 compiled from the tarball.  Linux stty command for
> > ttyS0 shows the port is there and active with the correct IO and
> > IRQ.  Xastir shows /dev/ttyS0 as "up" but nothing happens when I
> > try to "transmit now".  I originally compiled xastir without the
> > tnc connected so I tried it again with it on the port, still no
> > luck.  I noted the "tnc-startup.sys" is configured default for a
> > kantronics TNC so I have not modified it.  Obviously, either I am
> > missing something simple or even though Linux says ttyS0 is there,
> > it really isn't. Setserial does show it as active as well along
> > with the UART.
> >
> > Any help would be greatly appreciated.  I am so close I can taste
> > it.
> 
> Well, first of all I'd skip 1.2.0 and go directly to one of the
> January 2004 development releases.  The Jan 15th one would be a good
> one.
> 
> As far as the Kantronics TNC setup, you should probably use the
> tnc-startup.kpc3 file instead of the default.  There may be
> additional commands in there that are messing you up, or ones that
> you're missing.  The kpc3 file should give you the specific commands
> for the kpc3 and kpc3+ TNC's.
> 
> What is not working with the TNC, transmit, receive, or both?  Have
> you tried talking to that port with Minicom?  That would be my first
> step.
> 
> If you open the View->Incoming Data window in Xastir, are you seeing
> anything?  Seeing two lines per packet, or just one.  If two lines,
> you need to mess with the HEADERLN command or similar in the TNC.
> 
> I assume you've already created a serial TNC or serial KISS TNC
> interface and enabled it, setting the baud rate and such correctly.
> 
> If it is just transmit, you need to set transmit enabled for each
> interface you wish to transmit on, and set the global transmit
> enable on the Interface menu.  If either is off, you won't transmit.
> 
> Are you running the TNC in KISS mode or serial mode?  I run all my
> stuff in KISS mode, either with the AX.25 kernel networking, or with
> the serial KISS TNC interface.  The former allows me to share a TNC
> among several apps.
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Curt, WE7U     archer at eskimo dot com
> Arlington, WA, USA http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
> "Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
> "Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
> "The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
> 
> 
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Bob Poirier wrote:

> Thinkpads are a different breed.  I found out after your "use
> minicom" advice that my infrared virtual devices were still loaded
> and the resulting Com 1 problem was due to IBM infrared defaulting
> to that port.  The fix was to boot into Windows and use the IBM
> Thinkpad utility and System Configuration to completely rid the
> computer of any infrared devices.  Tpctl would probably also do
> this under Linux although I wasn't able to get it working
> properly.  My advice to Thinkpad owners is to keep a minimal
> Windows partition with the IBM config utilities on it.
>
> I also  found out that CVS bootstrap.sh wouldn't work properly
> until I  added RedHat's RPM, ac-archive.  Mandrake 9.2 doesn't
> provide it.  Apparently autoconfig  (at least Mandrake's version
> of 2.5.3) requires the additional header files that ac-archive
> provides.  Also noted that Mandrake's version of ImageMagick
> didn't work either.  I compiled it from source from the
> ImageMagick web site.  Their RPM for Festival works fine.
>
> After hours of fighting Linux configuration problems and the like,
> Xastir 1.2.1 is working fine.  Thanks for your help with my many
> questions. I have joined the Xastir-dev mailing lists, so any
> future queries will probably be easier to solve.

You should send that summary to the xastir list, so that it gets
into the archive and might help others.  If some of them are common
problems, they might make it into the FAQ at some point as well.

Glad you got it going!

-- 
Curt, WE7U. archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"