[Xastir] Xastir without X-Windows?

[Drew]

Greetings to everyone on the list! I am currently involved in a project 
using both aprs and packet radio, and am finding the learning curve to 
be rather steep but I'm realling hoping someone here can help me out. 
Here's the situation....

I'm running linux (Bering) on a small single-board computer. (Soekris 
Engineering net4511) This computer has no video/keyboard, all i/o is via 
a serial console or remote terminal. The idea is to send this little guy 
to 80K-100K feet using a large weather balloon. Communication with the 
balloon will be via packet radio and the balloon will report its 
position using APRS.

Or at least that's the idea. The computer has several serial ports, into 
which are plugged a gps receiver and a tnc. After I get AX.25 
installed/configured then what? I believe I need some sort of APRS 
"server" to listen to the gps and transmit the occasional APRS packet. 
In reading the xastir documentation it looks like I'd configure two 
interfaces, an AX.25 interface and a serial gps interface. Xastir then 
listens to the gps and transmits via the ax.25 interface. But how do I 
do all of this without X-Windows? The documentation says xastir requires 
x-windows. This makes sense for the tracking/mapping functionality, but 
what about the basic "server" (listen to gps, transmit aprs) 
functionality? Can Xastir do this? Am I even looking in the right 
direction? Any information regarding any of this would be so hopefull, 
I've spent hours scouring the web and am more confused than when I 
started. MANY MANY thanks to anyone that has a chance to reply to this.

~Drew