[Xastir] Low budget APRS with Xastir

[Jim Shorney]

That heretic that insists on using "obsolete" hardware is at it again...

The platform is an IBM Thinkpad 760E laptop that I purchased at an auction
for $17.50US.  Pentium (classic) 120 MHz.  After a flurry of e-bay buying, it
has a 20 gig hard disk and 74 megs of RAM (still looking for the Apricorn RAM
card that supports 104M).

It is now functional with basically a Debian 2.2 distro and an almost fully
loaded Xastir install, network enabled, and talking though that strange MWave
audio system with Festival.

I was pleasantly surprised, this thing performs amazingly well.  Cached map
loads are fast enough to be below the "annoying" threshold, and the system
does not seem to bog down at all when Xastir is "speaking".

Total cost of the laptop is still probably under $50US.  Cost of the
software/OS - 0.00.

On the flip side, setup did take quite some time and tinkering.  It is
definitely not for the faint of heart.  The learning curve involved in
shoe-horning this stuff onto older hardware is somewhat steep even for
someone who is experienced with Linux.  But the results were well worth it.

Major kudos to the Xastir development team for thier continued excellence in
what should be an award-winning software package!



-- 
Jim Shorney      -->.<--Put complaints in this box
jshorney (at) inebraska.com
Ham Radio NU0C
Lincoln, NE, USA
EN10ps
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/jshorney/