[Xastir] Dumb question #1

[hasan schiers]

(Many more to follow)

Using Debian on a 412 mhz celeron with 256 mb ram, Samba is working.

Xastir is up and running (9 days or so) very nicely, thanks to KB0JQO's
efforts.

He left a terminal window open that shows messages that periodically say:

KISS bad packet dropped.

I see four or five a day.

...what did he do to establish communications with Xastir from the terminal
window that lets me monitor what is going on?

(I'm using AGWPE to control my tnc's on a windows machine on the network). I
have two interfaces defined in Xastir, one for the internet and the other
connecting to AGWPE. It has been working beautifully!

I've been afraid to close that terminal window, because I don't want to lose
that monitoring function and not be able to restart it.

What other neat things can I do from that terminal window to "keep an eye"
on things Xastir is doing?

One of these days I'm going to have to figure out how to upgrade Xastir.
Ryan (KB0JQO) got the latest CVS about 10 days ago, and I haven't done
anything since. Xastir has run flawlessly for all this time, reconnecting to
the AGWPE machine automagically when it reboots each morning, without so
much as a hiccup.

I have the tiger maps working, a full set of Iowa counties downloaded and
working (very slowly), and a couple WinAPRS maps also working (much faster,
due to the little detail available in them). Basically I use the tiger maps
via the internet 99% of thte time. I have voice support working (Festival)
for most things, but the vplay thing doesn't work.

Lotsa fun so far, amazing feature set that I'm just scratching the surface
of. As anyone can tell, I have no idea what I'm doing. I understand aprs
features well, and the menu system in Xastir is quite good, no problem
getting around in it and doing assorted things....

but put me in front of that terminal window and I'm an idiot.

I'm wondering if I can plug my Western Digital 160 gig external USB hard
drive into the Debian machine and have it work, or if there is a bunch of
configuration stuff to do? Is it plug and play, plug and pray, or manual
configuration?

...hasan, N0AN