[aprssig] Latest Xastir Release: 1.4.0, 09/16/2004

[Curt, WE7U]

I took this reply off the aprsnews list, as it's not appropriate for
discussions, just important news items.  aprssig list is very
appropriate though.


On Thu, 23 Sep 2004, nc8q wrote:

> Sorry for top posting, but this is a general comment.
> I very much wish that software developers and maintainers
> would place a link to 'minimum system requirements' along
> with all the other links on the main web page.  It is so
> frustrating to find interesting software, download it,
> configure it, find missing package errors, get them,
> re-configure,..., then find out that it requires some
> hardware greater than what one has.

It's hard to come up with minimum hardware requirements for Xastir!
We've had people running it on 486's.  I personally run it on a P133
with 64MB of RAM, including synthesized speech (my mobile Jeep
computer), and a P200 laptop with 32MB of RAM, but of course more
RAM and more CPU is better.  What I list above is for Linux.  For
Windows you needs loads more CPU and RAM to get it installed and to
perform well.  It runs on a P4/1.7GHz with 256MB ram VERY well, in
fact I have three copies running on it right now, although each is
running under a different login..

I think if I were to resurrect my old 386SX-20 desktop machine, and
had at least 32MB of RAM in it, I could probably get Xastir to run
on it (talking about Linux again, as it's more efficient than
Windows).


> After downloading xastir-1.4.0, reading the README,
> then reading the INSTALL, I find that 'xastir' requires
> (1)Motif or OpenMotif or Lesstiff.
> On my system, I found two files;
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config/Motif.tmpl
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config/Motif.rules
> does this indicate that my system complies with (1) above?

Nope.  Typically (for Linux) you need to install packages like
"openmotif" and "openmotif-devel".  They're called different things
in different distributions, so it's hard to list them all and keep
the list current.  By subscribing to the Xastir mailing list you
gain access to people that are already running Xastir on your
platform, which will help you much more than any docs could (which
tend to be more general, across all platforms it runs on).


> (2) 'xastir' also requires 'pthreads'
> "#locate pthreads" returns nothing.
> Google/linux doesn't seem to return anything informative about
> 'pthreads' and my distribution, Slackware (v9.1).

Pthreads is installed in most Linux boxes.  The reason that is
listed there is because there were/are multiple competing threads
packages.  Perhaps we can take that out of our docs now for the most
part, but there may still be some OS'es that use other versions of
threading, then wonder why Xastir won't compile there.  You have to
remember that we are supporting MANY different operating systems, so
some things apply to some, some to others.


> Are there other requirements mentioned elsewhere in the
> documentation (or unmentioned) ?

Most likely.


> Is there a 'xastir-newbie' or 'xastir-install' mail list?

The "xastir" mailing list should help you.  Subscribe using the
links on the left at http://www.xastir.org.  I and others will help
you get it installed and running.

Perhaps you can do our project a favor by writing down all of your
experiences as you install, including writing down all of the
dependencies/requirements/fuzzy things in the docs that need to be
explained better, then later on donate back some patches to our docs
that fix the problems.

There's also README.Getting-Started, which is a relatively new doc.

--
Curt, WE7U			         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!"