Xastir in a Virtual Appliance Re: [Xastir] Better and/or Easier Way to Get Xastir on Windows

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 10:31:09PM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <duffy at wb8nut.com> flavor, containing:
> I tried this method and it works very well.
> 
> Go to www.vmware.com and download the free VMWare Player.  Install on 
> your windows machine.
> 
> Also on the VMWare site, download a virtual machine for Mepis Linux, 
> Ubuntu Linux, or Kubuntu.
> 
> Once it is downloaded, start the virtual machine in the VMWare player.  
> Now you have Linux running as a virtual machine on your windows machine 
> - at the same time.
> 
> While running Mepis, Ubuntu or Kubuntu, using the Package Manager, 
> download Xastir - it will install in the virtual machine.
> 
> Set it up to use AGWPE (yeah, download and install this first) on your 
> windows machine. Use the IP address of the windows machine in order for 
> Xastir to find AGWPE running on the windows O/S.
> 
> Now you can have Windows and Linux running at the same time, on the same 
> PC.  Since Linux is a virtual machine, it will not interfere with Windows. 
> 
> You can have the best of both worlds, on one PC, at the same time.

After reading the thread that this article started, I went ahead and bought
VMware Workstation for my new Ubuntu laptop.  I probably could have just used
the vmware server, but in the end decided that US$200 was worth it, especially
since I needed virtualization for something else anyway.

This past weekend I generated a relatively small virtual appliance containing 
a slightly-stripped-down Xubuntu distribution, all the libraries and 
development packages needed to build xastir, the Xastir source tree checked 
out from CVS, and Xastir built with almost all optional libraries (I left out 
festival and gdal/ogr, but have everything else).  I even set up three 
interfaces (an internet server, a D700, and a KPC3) most of the way, so that a 
user could just finish up a few small configuration options and get on the air 
using a virtual serial port to communicate with the TNC (instead of having 
to set up AGWPE) --- even if that virtual serial port is provided by a USB to 
Serial adapter through the Windows side.  The entire thing, with no added 
maps, zips down to a bit over 500MB, still plenty small enough for a CD to 
distribute in Xastir evangelical work.

I chose the Xubuntu distribution over Ubuntu or Kubuntu because of the 
light-weight desktop environment it provides through Xfce instead of Gnome or 
KDE.  Xubuntu's a distribution intended to bring a usable linux desktop 
experience even to old, slow processors with not much disk space --- which 
sounded like a perfect choice for a virtual machine that could wind up being 
installed on a loaded Windows box.  It's not the slickest desktop and is not 
all that much like Windows, but it stays out of the way and lets xastir have 
most of the cycles.  Properly set up with xastir as a desktop icon and help files on the desktop, the rest of the environment shouldn't be all that important 
anyway.   I stripped out the open office word processor to make more space,
since the Xubuntu distribution comes with a lighter weight WP that I can't 
remove (it's part of the desktop package) and most Windows users would just 
use Word natively anyway.  Unfortuntely I was unable to strip out some of the 
other baggage like the Gaim IM chat client and some of the multimedia stuff, 
becuase it, too, was a dependency of the actual desktop package and couldn't 
be removed without removing the desktop, too.

I am also working on a localized version with added maps, but went overboard 
and will have to pare it down a lot if I'm to make it a reasonably sized
Zip file.  

I thought I was done with the no-added-maps appliance, but in the process of 
writing some help files in html (so that users have a "click here to get 
started" document), I figured out some ways that I want to refine the more 
bare-bones one, too (like, using NAT instead of bridged ethernet, for those 
users who might only have one IP address available to them,  and possibly 
smbfs and cups services so that the linux VM can get at Windows printers and
disk shares).  Once I'm done, the no-local-maps version should be a perfectly 
general virtual appliance for anyone to use for APRS instead of starting
with one of the generic linux distros available through the VMware site.

Since the VM contains a CVS checkout of xastir and all libraries and headers it
needs to build, updating xastir is as simple in the appliance as a "cvs update"
and a "source reconfigure && make && sudo make install" operation (I've 
provided a "reconfigure" script to hold a few extra command line options).

Unfortunately, there is no way I could possibly serve the 500+MB file to share
it with more than one or two people through a temporary FTP site.  So if anyone
were to find this useful, it might be desirable for someone with huge bandwidth
capabilities to get it started as a torrent the way the other virtual appliances
are distributed.  If there is such a person, we can arrange  for me to make 
a copy temporarily available as soon as it's a little cleaner (probably in 
the next few days).

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick