[Xastir] New, Updated box time - which Linux??

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 04:37:56PM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <dreichen at columbus.rr.com> flavor, containing:
> 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 I call a Distro War!

Heh.  So far this has been the most civilized "distro war" I've seen.  Just 
don't ask whether to use emacs or vi. 

> The right linux is not Linux. 

You got my vote.

> I have among my collection a FreeBSD Stable AMD64 Bit distro.  I also 
> run a Debian varient, (or Deviant, if you prefer 8^) and Solaris.  Among 
> them, I think I like the FreeBSD distro the best among the PC type 
> computers.  I just download the minimal size cdrom and net install the 
> majority of the OS.  The learning curve isn't that much different from 
> Linux to BSD.

FreeBSD has done well by me for about 15 years.  I run it on my home machine, 
work laptop, and three desktop machines at work.  I vastly prefer the 
ports system to the various package management systems that I've seen on 
linux systems.  

Getting xastir to run on FreeBSD is not difficult.  In fact, there is even a
"port" in the ports collection that downloads and builds Xastir 1.8.2
and all of its dependencies from source, with a simple option picker that lets 
you add in compile options (rtree, gdal, shapelib, gpsman, map caching, 
festival, etc.).  I think, though, that the port is set up slightly wrong and 
if you ask for "gpsman" support it builds and installs gpsman, but doesn't 
install gpsmanshp (which is really what xastir uses) -- but if you use the 
ports collection to install gpsmanshp (which will install shapelib and 
gpsman in the process) and *then* install xastir with gpsman support, it'll 
all be good.  

As soon as you've installed xastir via the ports collection, you
will get a full development environment needed for building CVS xastir as a
side-effect --- just do a "pkg_delete" of xastir and then rebuild it from
CVS instead.  

It is possible that Gentoo is as easy, since Gentoo Linux uses the same type
of ports collection that FreeBSD uses.  But I can't say that for sure since
I've only heard good things about Gentoo's ports management, never experienced 
them first-hand.  I also don't know if anyone's done a Gentoo port for xastir.

The only downside I've found to FreeBSD is that sometimes bleeding edge hardware
is harder to get working than on Linux, because the user base is smaller and
some vendors these days have replaced the "We supply Windows drivers, why 
should we open the programing interface?" attitude with "We supply drivers for 
Windows and Linux, why should we open the programming interface?"  That said, 
I've had very little trouble putting together good machines with only hardware 
that supports open source OSen other than Linux.

One thing you can't have on BSD is kernel AX.25 support.

These days there is a fairly large collection of ham-radio related stuff
available for FreeBSD compared to what was available only a little while ago.
The ports collection currently contains a number of packages for
SSTV, PSK31, rig control, antenna modeling, and contest logging.  Each takes
only "cd /usr/ports/comms/<packagename>; make install clean" to set up.

> Bennett, Bruce wrote:
> 
> >My xastir station is showing it's age - hardware-wise.  Since I'm going to
> >build a new computer, I'm wondering if anyone has any strong opinions about
> >which flavor of Linux fits xastir best...  I've used Fedora (really full
> >RedHat) and Debian for my prior stations.

-- 
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