The ham radio repository is available for openSUSE 11.0. You can either use one-click or add http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_11.0/. Thanks to Tim (DG7GT) and Jan-Simon for making it happen. With out doubt, openSUSE now rivals Debian for the number of ham radio packages available.
Desktop Menu Update
June 30, 2008 — ww7baI just looked at version 1.0 of the Desktop Menu Specification. On June 17, I ranted that HamRadio was not a registered category. Appendix A now lists HamRadio as a registered Additional Category, whose Main Category is either Network or Audio. The next step is for ham radio package developers to comply with the freedesktop.org specifications.
Confusion Reigns
June 17, 2008 — ww7baWhen I install a ham radio application, I have no idea where, or even if, there is a menu entry for the executables in the application. The hamradiomenus packages was supposed to solve the problem for Debian and its derivative distros. Even if the package worked, it still requires that the user edit the .desktop file for each application in the package. To make matters worse, very few ham radio packages include a .desktop file.
Ham Software for Fedora
June 12, 2008 — ww7baThere are ham radio packages available for Fedora, and the Fedora community does have a SIG for Amateur Radio. Alas, it is still getting off the ground. You can find out what is available for Fedora Bob Jensen’s site: http://bjensen.fedorapeople.org/pkgs/hams/. It is a start, and they are making progress.
openSUSE Ham Software Repository
June 12, 2008 — ww7baWhile it is not well published, openSUSE does maintain a repositories for ham radio software. You won’t find it in the list of repositories, but there is a repository for each version since openSUSE 10,0. The URLs are as follow:
- download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/SUSE_Linux_10.0
- download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/SUSE_Linux_10.1
- download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_10.2
- download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_10.3
- download.opensuse.org/repositories/hamradio/openSUSE_11.0
You will be surprised at how much software is available.
Splatter – July 2008
June 11, 2008 — ww7baFrom discussions on Wednesday night’s TechNet and emails with Bob (WA7YNU), it appears that the difference between a virtual console and a virtual terminal deserves more discussion. While both allow you to enter commands, they are different.
Splatter – June 2008
June 5, 2008 — ww7baWhen you first start using Linux, it is hard to tell where applications are installed, and how to start them. To shed a little light on this topic, I am going to use unixcw, cw (command-line application), and cwcp (graphical application) as example packages (RPM distributions bundle all the application into a single UnixCW package). The environment for this discussion is a laptop running Linux Mint, an Ubuntu derivate, which is a Debian derivative. Since the laptop only has 256 MiB of memory, I am using the Xfce desktop. The eye-candy of KDE and Gnome is nice, but takes a heavy toll on memory resources.
Splatter – April 2008
June 5, 2008 — ww7baIn an earlier article, I mentioned that each Linux distribution has software repositories. The major advantage of these software repositories is that the software has already been compiled for a particular version of a Linux distribution. You just need to use the package manager for the distribution to install the package. If you go to the Web site for the software, you may not find a RPM or DEB package for the specific version of Linux that you are using. Instead, you will find source code that needs to be compiled, and installed.
Splatter – March 2008
June 5, 2008 — ww7baHardware issues are the greatest challenge you will face during Linux installation. It isn’t because Linux lacks in driver support from the open source community. Linux actually has more hardware drivers than any other operating system, including Microsoft Windows. This is in part due to the number of platforms for which Linux is available. The hardware manufactures that have proprietary drivers that only support Microsoft Windows are the real culprits. The worst offenders are the manufactures of WiFi cards, and video cards. What life really exciting are those manufactures that change the chipset on the card, but don’t change the model number. As the number of Linux users grows, the number of manufactures that support Linux grows.
