[Xastir] boot from external drive?

[Jason Winningham]

The xubuntu virtual machine is much easier to deal with than cygwin,  
but there are still problems getting xastir running on windows of the  
variety that windows users either can't or won't deal with.  Even  
with the config file hardcoding, the usb/rs232/drivers/VM connection  
is too problematic.  My latest instance may be windows driver issues,  
but regardless of the source if there is a problem it requires a VM  
reboot to clear it up.  My users are not willing to take a chance,  
and are abandoning the xastir VM in favor of APRS+SA (bring me my  
bucket!)

Has anyone tried putting a linux distro on an external drive (like a  
USB powered laptop drive enclosure) to boot linux and run xastir?   
I'd gladly set up such a drive for the balloon chasers to use, if it  
would work.  Live distros work, but they are so slow I can't get my  
users to use them, and there is the problem of saving (and total ease  
of losing) the logged data.


I'll take this chance to lobby the developers once again to please  
target xastir 2 to some cross-platform development environment, so we  
can run native on windows.  I don't do windows, but there are just  
too blasted many people who do.

-Jason
kg4wsv