[RTTY] With XP support ending... - long -

[Salvatore Irato]

Hi all.
LINUX, I write it all in capitals letters as I come from VMS, BSD and
SYS V - mine it's an ancient and romantic view, is well suited and
well working under several environments. There are ways to make it
working under several different HW and Sw approaches. But ...
FLDIGI would not do nor Contesting nor FSK right on from the binaries.
Contesting may be ... with some personal inventive using the macros,
it could be done.
But it have only pseudo FSK , a form of manipulation over presence and
absence of a single tone from the audio board. This will mean that
anybody of us must have commercial or HM circuit to decode this tone
as bits and to manipulate in CC the FSK input of our transceiver.
Nothing that is not that bad, but we must use it to properly use FSK
on our transceiver.
This would eliminate in any case any problem like ALC control, power
level by power level, band by band or whatever it is. It will also
eliminate the nedd to be constantly over the 2 KHz of the audio band.
As emitting AFSK with a poor audio board will send anyway out audio
harmonics of our tones ... wel depending on several factors, but
usually it is true with a large part of transceivers that use SSB
filters to transmit AFSK.

Out of this I would not rely on LINUX, due to my past and present
experience. What I mean id that it would be easyly made working, quite
any flavour of it, but the one of us not alphabetized with LINUX will
have serious stop gaps configuring it and using it.

The last suggestion was a Windows emulator inside a LINUX. This may
seem the right solution, but also it have two possible issues:
1) computational power and memory of the native machine
2) drivers on both sides
    a) LINUX side - drivers for commercial interfaces, audio is the worst
    b) Windows side - native drivers that look at the emulated LINUX side

Not all that worst. By example using whatever will work, but this will
require several try out also with some equipment buys ... try and buy
until it work. Having the luck that something work at first time. With
the right HW & SS off the LINUX side.
Also here what would work more easy is ... and audio interface that
work, ehmmm ... and some HM interfacing for PTT and FSK. It usually
work more easy than to have commercial interfaces.

At the end, year by year is much more easy that LINUX distributions,
and Windows emulator under LINUX, may work  within ours scopes without
troubles for the more IT illiterate of us. It easy to find peoples
that get it working off the shelf. But there is not a constant
success, on every HW, on every SW distribution, on every "gadget" we
need to attach it.

Using LINUX, even the most stable and well done distributions - MINT
i.e. - is still a businesses for IT literate even if by now is much
more easy that us not so literate have success.

I will not embrace anyway LINUX as there is nothing like N1MM Logger
under it. Is too much easy to use it daily and to learn how to work
with it that using it during Contest come quite alone.

I am not braking anybody, believe me, but it's not the case tu rush on
it one week before any event. Making a monthly try to prepare it for
Field Day test it's a great idea. Making it  common project for a Club
is even better. But then anybody of us must assume that it was working
only with those things connected. Perspectives that any LINUX
configuration will work out of the shelf are not that more as for
Windows and even mac. Be advised and take care. Even if all of us
aren't make the same. I think it's also applicable: " ... our mileage
may be variable ... "

BTW all those standalone backup proposed - Acronis, Clonezilla,
Macrium - and quite all others anyway are made with with LINUX.
Clonezilla is clearly stating it and have no GUI interface, it my
considered in the rude side but need really a low amount of system
resources. Other have theirs GUI resembling the one of windows.
Clonezzilla if free, Macrium have a free- personal.use version. I am
not sure about Acronis, maybe it have only the trial version.


             73 de iw1ayd Salvo

... caveat emptor ...
Let's try vi or chown 543 username, use a symbol substitution to get
rid of rm -rf - don't left it usable by anyone. AWK is great for
contest score calculations. Perl for strings workouts is a paramount
and somewhat easy than AWK. When I was teaching BSD one of my
preferred joke was:"Take care as UNIX is the only OS that just pushing
more than two keys on the keyboard will fire an unpredictable
command." Well, this is the polite way to say it.
Who is using the pure GUI of LINUX is just limiting itself to the surface