[Xastir] Re: Installing on Ubuntu 6.10

[Jason Winningham]

I've got a Knoppix live with an older version of xastir on it,  
downloadable here

http://www.eng.uah.edu/pub/

or here

ftp://ftp.eng.uah.edu/pub/


There are CD and DVD images.  The xastir version is a bit old (1.4.1,  
IIRC).

Switching to a DVD does preclude the use of many older machines, but  
it also allows you to get more data on it; I think I managed three or  
four states worth of TIGER shapefiles as well as my favorite set of  
National Atlas shapfiles in about 3.6Gb.  The CD version has only the  
National Atlas files, so there isn't much detail. I recovered a fair  
amount of space by getting rid of extra language support in the OS,  
OpenOffice, etc.

the most obnoxious part was getting the default .xastir (with my map  
properties) installed in the default home directory.  I had to pick  
apart a compressed ramdisk image file (initrd.dmz, IIRC), install the  
files, and put it back together.  If we could put some of these  
properties with the maps instead of in the users's home directory it  
would be much easier (hmm, I thought I had put in a feature request  
for that; doesn't look like it).

It is slow.  Very slow.  But it beats the heck out of running APRS+SA.

You can get around the issue of the configuration going away by  
simply copying it to a jump drive or the system hard drive.

IMO, people aren't going to use a live disc very much anyway - it's  
going to be a one-time event, or they're gonna like it and go to the  
trouble of a cygwin install so they can run it from the hard disk.

On the balloon chase this weekend we had two teams who used the live  
DVD and a third who decided to go with the cygwin install.  I missed  
the post-flight dinner/bull session so I didn't hear details, but it  
seemed to be working well for the team who was chasing with us.

-Jason
kg4wsv