[aprssig] Xastir install issues

[Dave Baxter]

Hi...

The problem I found, was that only sources were available for download,
no runable binaries, despite Windows being in the list of supported OS's
on the Source Forge site.  Even then only in .tar or .gz formats.
Neither of those could be handled by either Puppy, Suse (or WinZip!) as
far as I could find.  At least there was no association between those
file types and any application provided in the distro'.  WinZip
recognised them, but croaked on checksum problems.

Also, compiling and linking, in my mind needs access to a
compiler/linker?!?  If you don't have one lying about, unlikely for a
newbie with a fresh install of Linux (whatever distro') you get nowhere.
If there is one "hidden" within Linux, it needs to advertise itself so
we can find it, or be associated with a make file, or whatever the
equivalent is.

The one thing that the Windoze community has sorted very well, is the
automated install utilities.  99% of the time, the result works as the
programmer intended.

Until the Linux community can get to that sort of state, making it
"newbie friendly" many will take a look, say "Neat", but go no further.
Puppy is trying to do something along the automated install with it's
.pup and .get schemes.  But as yet, only a handful of people can make
such files that work, but they do work very well.

The Linux community also need to tune up their distro's.  Suse 9 on a P4
1800 with 256MEG of ram, and many Gig of fast hard disk, it ran about as
fast as an arthritic snail on a go slow, and that after some 15 minutes
to boot!  For that one reason alone, I'd bin it...  No online help was
available that I could access, via the net, phone or on the CD.

Puppy run's fast, but there again the whole package fit's into RAM, so
it would, and does!  But at the moment has limited support for non Puppy
sourced applications.  The free FTP server is the only thing I use it
for at the moment.

Xastir again looks good, and not only I would like to play with it, and
fully evaluate it.  So come on the Xastir types, do what it says on the
side of the (Source Forge) tin, and make a Windows version we can
actually download, install and use, WITHOUT having to compile/link etc.
Start with one built for Win98.  That should run on 98, 2000 and XP
without problems, covering the majority of Ham users I'd think.

That is all...

Dave G0WBX.