On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Jim Tolbert wrote: > I have a 3 year old laptop (Windows XP) that I could dedicate to > this. I have to wipe the disk anyway. What Linux do I want? Do I > reformat the disk before installing Linux? What do I do about > various device drivers?
You'll get various votes on the different Linuxes. I personally use OpenSuSE, and develop/use Xastir with it. Other developers and users have differing opinions. One of our developers is running FreeBSD. When installing most Linux distributions they'll give you the option to take over the whole disk or install in a dual-boot configuration. If you don't want XP on there, Linux will happily take over and repartition for it's own use. > Another stupid question,...... What does the automatic polling of the > field GPS units -- Xastir or the "Digipeater" (I obviously don't know > what this is <grin>)? In this case it's Xastir telling the attached Rino to poll the others. Xastir has a timing slider for determining the interval at which to poll. Every time a Rino hears a poll packet it should respond with it's position, at which point any Rino that is within simplex range and hears it will update the position and show it on it's GPS map screen. Normally you only see the position when the Rino user manually presses his "send my position" button or whatever it is called. You can request the position of friends of yours, but I think you need to know part or all of their ID in order to do this. Can't remember the details, but with the Xastir setup you have to have "APRS" as the prefix for each callsign, then each device out there that matches will respond. A digipeater is a digital repeater. On APRS we use them on mountaintops/hilltops/buildings to extend the range greatly for mobiles/portables as they run around. We use a "flooding" protocol in the U.S. and Canada where the packet gets sent out along the digipeaters in all directions at once up to two or three hops. This gives us a few hundred mile range here in the western U.S. RINO's can't do this. You have to use Amateur Radio APRS plus have an amateur radio license to do it. -- Curt, WE7U. APRS Client Comparisons: 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!" _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list Xastir@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir