[Xastir] VMWare, CVS, & DAO -- probably dumb questions...

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 11 May 2009, riverridge at centurytel.net wrote:

> yet....... anyway, I was running  openSUSE on an old laptop, but
> the lack of drivers for the modem and wireless and problems with
> the CD reader lead me to move to a different old laptop.  On this
> one, I loaded a clean install of Windows Xp with all the drivers
> and everything working -- as well as windows works....( but it is
> what I know)

Laptops can be the most difficult to get any OS running on.  They
like to take shortcuts with the hardware sometimes and/or do things
differently than desktops, therefore the software drives don't
always do the right things.  Sometimes you need to do some special
tweaking to get certain drivers going.  Sometimes you can't.

There are good resources online that you can find from

     http://www.google.com/linux

Put in the keyword "laptops"


> Since I am using the ArgentDatas new T2-301 trackers and I
> understand that they are capable transmitting DAO format data, I
> would like to try to get that working.   Last July, there was a
> discussion of Xastir using DAO format data and Curt indicated that
> it was turned on in the development release of Xastir.

You can use DAO with "regular" format APRS packets or switch to
Base-91 encoding and gain higher precision packets w/o having to use
DAO.


> Is there a way for me to check to see if the DAO format data
> utilization is turned on in the version that I am already using?

I'll have to check whether the white precision rectangles update
their size in Xastir when you're using DAO.  That's the usual way I
tell precision at a glance with any format.  It's easy to tell the
LARGE Mic-E rectangles from the smaller NMEA or Base-91 formats.

Ok, the code has this:

  // Check for !DAO!, beginning from the comment field.  Datum is
  // not used for the time being.  Note: error/precision information
  // (the white box on the map) is not updated here, because changes
  // to p_station->lat/lon_precision are overridden in the calling
  // function.
  dao_rval = decode_dao(&dao_lat, &dao_lon, &dao_datumch, my_data + 19);

So... There's no indication when DAO is working other than you'll
get more exact positioning of the icon on the screen.  The white
precision rectangles don't get any smaller.


> I know that I have read the answer to this somewhere, but have
> been unable to lay my fingers on it this evening.....  How do I
> make is so that each tracker on the screen has a different colored
> trail?  Right now, all three trails are all royal blue.

If you are running all of them under your callsign with different
SSID's, turn off:

     Configure->Defaults->My trails in one color

That's about the only way I can think of that they'd all be blue.
Color gets assigned the first time a station is added to the
in-memory database, but can be changed on an individual station
basis from Station Info->Change Trail Color.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"