[Xastir] Newbee question re: Garmin Rino / Cygwin / Xastir and SAR

[Gerry Creager]

Tom Russo wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 11:16:50AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
>> On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Jim Tolbert wrote:
>>
>>> I have a 3 year old laptop (Windows XP) that I could dedicate to
>>> this.  I have to wipe the disk anyway.  What Linux do I want? Do I
>>> reformat the disk before installing Linux?  What do I do about
>>> various device drivers?
>> You'll get various votes on the different Linuxes.  I personally use
>> OpenSuSE, and develop/use Xastir with it.  Other developers and
>> users have differing opinions.  One of our developers is running
>> FreeBSD.
> 
> But that developer (me) wouldn't recommend FreeBSD for anyone other than 
> hardcore Unix geeks.  It's better for server systems than desktops (in my 
> current opinion after over 15 years of using it), and not well suited for
> a first non-windows system.
> 
> I recommend one of the Ubuntu systems for sheer ease of install and use,
> especially for folks new to Linux.  It is a solid desktop (or laptop)
> environment with good support.
> 
> If it's older hardware, you probably don't need special device drivers,
> except maybe if you want hardware accelerated 3D graphics (which you don't
> need for xastir).

And these days, I prefer CentOS as it's stable, costs about the right 
price and pretty reliable.  Down-side is in some of the libs we need for 
Xastir (but most are fine) may require compiling from scratch instead of 
RPM install, or finding non-vetted replacements from things like the dag 
repository.

As for stable desktops, I've been well pleased.

gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
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