[Xastir] standards are wonderful...

[mark.rice at L-3com.com]

Standards are wonderful... there's so many to choose from.

 

But I was really getting furious...  I was given a slightly used
motherboard and thought it was time to upgrade the OS and Xastir (was
using Fedora Core 5 and Xastir 1.84).  So I loaded Ubuntu 9.04 and
things went pretty smoothly with Xastir 1.95, too.

 

The motherboard had a 10-pin header plug for the serial, but I didn't
get a ribbon cable for it. The header looked the same as another
motherboard that I had.  I found a few extra serial ribbon cables lying
around in my 'old parts' stash... so it was done, right?

 

Well, after wringing my hands over the man pages of setserial, stty, and
cu, I couldn't get even a simple loopback to work. I was disgusted,
because it seemed like peripherals have always been a problem area for
me and Linux (well.... maybe just me.)

 

Finally, I wondered if the serial ribbon cable had the proper pin-out
for the motherboard header....  no, it didn't.  It wasn't even close,
and I kick myself for not checking that.  But who would make their own
standard, eh?  

 

With a soldering gun, two serial ribbon cables, and a bit of time I made
a serial adapter cable with the right pin-out and things are humming
along just fine between the tnc and computer.

 

Standards are wonderful....   

 

-          Mark Rice

KK5MR