I recently revisited PSKmail as I had previously downloaded fldigi and was thinking that I had that program working. I did the necessary unzip and untar, although I could not get the regular GUI program to do it. It indicated no directory to put it in and so I just used the terminal program. I am using Kubutu, but tried to follow the detailed downloads required for Ubuntu and ran into lots of problems with it not finding or being able to do things with the rather large numbers of files, but kept trying various ways from other Linux variants and somehow managed to get everything installed.
As an aside, Linux developers have to figure out how to make this all a part of the program or the OS or whatever. It is amazingly difficult and convoluted to do all this "stuff" just to get one program to work. Windows is so incredibly superior to this downside of Linux that it will be (or is already) a non starter for most computer users. You can call people dumb and all that, as some of the Linux zealots do on a rather regular basis, but this is a huge stumbling block. And very retro in today's advanced operating systems. Like my wife says, "I just want it to work." I was able to eventually figure out how to get everything to work and attempted connecting with several of the listed e-mail stations and did connect to the 5 station once I got on the correct QRG. That was impressive. I did not have anything connected up yet to an e-mail program so that will require more configuration but I thought I might just try and send just anything from the keyboard. Ooops, I crashed X Windows. Then I recalled that some time back, this was an on-going problem with my computer:( Does anyone else have this problem with fldigi? It has something to do with entering any data in the transmit window and X just goes into an immediate reboot. Or perhaps a later version has this fixed? Are any stations using PSKmail here in the U.S.? Can you tell us of your experiences? After using NBEMS at bit, am I right that the error correction ARQ is the same or very close to the way that PSKmail does this? If so, why can't this be ported over to MS OS? This would give us an additional tool for emergencies as well as some practical e-mail capability that is very narrow mode. 73, Rick, KV9U
