[Xastir] Fwd: help

[Lee Bengston]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 6:49 PM, Tom Russo <russo at bogodyn.org> wrote:
> There are a couple of reasons that I no longer use Xastir for my igates.
>
>  -- Does not transmit a "courtesy posit" along with a gated message.
>     javAPRSSrvr does this --- when it gates a message from a station that
>     has not been heard on RF to one that has, it also gates the most recent
>     posit for that station, so you get your sending station on the map.
>  -- The "nws-stations.txt" trick does not quite offer the full
>     flexibility I want.  At some point, I found that it wasn't even gating
>     reliably the stations I had listed there, and I never could figure out
>     why not (it wasn't a matter of interface settings, because it gated
>     normal messages Just Fine).
>  -- Xastir requires a GUI display.  javAPRSSrvr will run on my headless
>     Sheevaplug, and I can use that plug computer as the 24/7 APRS hub in the
>     shack (it shares its AX25 port across my LAN with ldsped, where other
>     computers run Xastir and APRSISCE/32).  My second igate (KM5VY-11), run
>     for a local club, runs on an ancient panasonic "toughbook" laptop that is
>     such a dog it can barely run an X server, and given that it's in a locked
>     room at a repeater site, an X-based solution makes no sense.
>
> Xastir is great as an APRS client, and certainly can do better at igating than
> some of the stuff that's out there, but if all you want is an IGate there are
> better choices, especially for remote igate sites.

Thanks Tom for clarifying.  I'm using a fairly low powered computer
(Acer 'Revo1600') that has a netbook motherboard - Intel Atom CPU,
etc.  I used to run it headless, and aprx was a decent non-X dependent
IGate for that.  Recently I connected it to a KVM switch, so now GUI
apps are fair game (the XFCE desktop works OK - in fact I'm in gmail
on it now.)  It sounds like JavAPRSSrvr has some advantages.  I just
wanted to make sure Xastir didn't have some glaring hole in its IGate
implementation that I was not aware of.

Regards,
Lee - K5DAT