I’ve started up my beacon monitoring project with my ‘spare’ IC-703 connected to a portable antenna. Unfortunatley I have had some real problems with the computer side of the hardware with one motherboard fizzing into oblivion over christmas.
I’m still having problems with the automatic update so a tempoary page with the current data is here
A while ago I switched our main PC over to Linux. After a number of attempts with Mandrake, Xandros and a few other flavours I found that although I’m not someone who doesn’t spend hours having a go at Microsoft and I definately don’t hate windows (I do however find Apple a little rotten) I wanted somthing that was free, open and community supported and perhaps to lend what little support I could to open source stuff in general and the noble individuals who provide free software.
So my main computer had Ubuntu 6.04 installed and things worked out quite well for a while, then a few niggles where peripherals didn’t work and that little add ons took many hours of time to install and run and worst of all I couldn’t do what I used to be able to do with windows. So it was time for a short second stab. I now have 2 drives attached to the PC, one for Linux and one for windows. I plan to run all the radio stuff of the windows drive, things like Ham radio deluxe and other utlilities that I use infrequently such as Fair Use Wizard for when I want to watch my DVD’s on my Archos PVR. All with a long term view of switching over to Linux and it improves and my needs change.
First impressions are that it is still polished and still labour intensive but there are tools like Automatix2 which do a lot for you and it still has the same look and feel that i need to get used to again. but this time the bootloader give me the option of MCE or Ubuntu which is so much better and because there are physically 2 drives I can always unplug on or cut the power with a switch
There have been a number of issues that have been resolved over the last few weeks, only to be replaced with new ones and I have to say that it revolves round the IT aspects more than anything else….
My router decided to reset tself and not allow any wireless connections which don’t really help, the CF card decided not to boot up without doing a ctrl, alt delete when it beeps, absolutley no idea what on earth is going on there and to top it all off the wind off the sea has been so strong over the last few days i took down the antenna and put it in the nice warm garage…lastly the roof started leaking through a vent that the builders couldn’t be bother to connect up properly so I’ll be drying out and repainting the bathroom ceiling shortly as well.
??All in all not a great week for progress, but with a fair wind the monitoring can be started in the new year fully with the time off I have planned.
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