Leap into action and nominate your favorite open source software

Thats what I experienced, too. But I still tried and tried. I began in the end of the 90s with a SUSE distribution. It was like hell to me. The next was Corel Linux based on Debian. That was a big step forward. After a longer period of changing between the worlds of Windows and Linux, I found my personal way to Linux.

When you had different problems in the past with Mint and others, just try the Manjaro distro. Its based on Arch Linux and should be stable. Special here are the new thoughts in updating. They call it rolling distribution or releases.

But all in all HAM-Radio software is mostly a problem. Not so many users, so that you maybe contact the developers themself to find a solution for problems. And for example CubicSDR is a big work site at the momet.
When you found your way, you will not leave. Otherwise maybe run away.

 

You set a good example and did more than to save money. What you did is to generate the so called own capitalized costs. And this with your knowings and your own human capital. Its mostly to measure by yourself what it is in money and if it was worth. Nobody can take this from you.

 

Thank you.
Yes, I too have tried many Linux distros, and I agree that Manjaro is a fine one and a good introduction to Arch. (others used since 1998 include: Red Hat, Slackware, Gentoo, BSD, SuSE, Fedora, Debian, Kali, Mepis, Ubuntu, Mint..)
I like it, but also know that there are few apps included for ham radio in its easy "Add/Remove Software" , so the huge but rambling AUR repository is necessary, and most of this is source code. Good if the user is comfortable compiling binaries. Rolling updates, also good but Mint updates also work well. It seems that many prefer the Mint that already includes many ham apps ready to install and run. The advantage is that the included packages are generally complete and all dependencies etc are already resolved.
If the Cinnamon desktop is chosen for Mint, it even looks a bit like Win, so maybe a little easier for the first-time Linux user.

Maybe related, but almost every OS screwup I'm asked to unscrew has no backup. Good backup utilities are free; an easy restore is priceless!

73, John KX4QC
https://NoEyeDeer.org

Why does everyone want a Restore app, but never a Backup app?

 

Thank God!!

I want them to continue to create, make, and sell high quality radios with super value, excellent resale value --and at low margins!

My estimates of how much my radios--IC 7800, IC 705, TS990s, FT710-- have cost me in purchase, repair (NONE!) ,and including their resale value , amount to about a DOLLAR A DAY!

A dollar a day to OWN *FOUR* WORLD- CLASS RADIOS!

Not ONE MINUTE of my time has been put into debugging , doodling, or fixing.

Not 'free'--"Free markets" at their best!

 

Congratulations, and so it should be for a well-run station, particularly without experimenting, updating.

Haven't we seen prize-winning screwups from poorly run installations, regardless of which OS / rig manf?

I might have missed it, but I'm not sure how this relates to your favorite open source apps. Do I understand that you have no open source apps, as you feel you get better value when you pay? Maybe it gets better still, the more you pay? (Not sure about that last bit...)

I suspect that you run a fine station based on best operating principles, and hope that it continues to provide outstanding value. Perhaps there is more than one way to do this?

73, John KX4QC

 

Timeshift is save.

 

Yes, good backup, but now I like Back In Time more. Both are based on rsync; I like the options that are easy to script, even over an encrypted internet link.

 

Since the topic is "Open-Source" software, I am a Linux user. I also subscribe to the N3FJP logging software suite. I would really love to see this ported to Linux, so that it can be run as a "native" Linux application, as opposed to have to be run under WINE. I've never had any luck with that. I can get WSJT-X and Fldigi as Linux applications, but not N3FJP. And please, I am aware of the other Linux-based logging programs, but I just prefer how the N3FJP packages work. But I don't like having to switch over to a Windows computer just to compete in a contest. Why isn't N3FJP available for the Linux community?

 

Yes, good too, even if not OS. In fact, there's no N3FJP source offered at all.
I don't have N3FJP, but running Log4OM under Wine was instructive: Wine worked well, but was version dependent. Maybe CROSSOVER
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover/ would do better.

FWIW, there's a post by Saku OH1KH, one of the authors about a new contest version of CQRLOG at https://noeyedeer.org/viewtopic.php?p=44&hilit=cqrlog#p44

CQRLOG does single op contesting, as does the log facility of FLDIGI. There's only one of me, so they are more than enough. But yes, it's time for multi-rig multi-op.

John KX4QC

 

FLDigi and qsstv are really useful ham-specific programs

Add to that:
Audacity - a digital audio recorder/editor
XCircuit - a nice if somewhat old schematic drawing program
KiCAD - for making schematics and printed circuit boards
gerbv - for displaying PCB artwork
The Arduino development environment
Micro Python for developing ESP8266 and ESP32 platform applications
matplotlib - an incredibly versatile library of graphing software

And of course Linux and its many distributions. I've used Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Raspian and Fedora to
name a few. Most of the above programs are available as easily installed packages on those distributions.

 

It's FT8CN (not YT)... Agreed... It is way cool!

 

For SDR developers is the GNU Radio Companion a must have, too.

 

The fun part about open source software is you never know where it's going to end up. The DVB-T2 transmitter that I developed for GNU Radio has been the most surprising. In 2017, it was selected for the Rohde and Schwarz engineering competition. Just recently, I've been helping some postgraduate students at the University of Crete with their DVB-T2 projects.

 

Rohde und Schwarz and AOR Japan are first class adresses. To that Open Source is always good for a surprise, in cause of so many dreamers, developers, makers and tinkers.

 

I've never been too concerned about the openness of the source to an application that I use - in fact, I'm really not sure which of the applications I use are open source and which are not. I run Linux on my work laptop and Windows 10 on the shack PC and my play laptop - but I don't make a distinction between the two. Yes, I could gain access to the source code of Debian but not to Windows, but I've never modified or recompiled Debian - I just use it as an alternative operating system which has some technical advantages over Windows in some applications. The vast majority of Linux users do the same - I actually am (or, at least, have been) a systems programmer and would be capable of understanding the Linux kernel code, but very few Linux users would be.

Similarly, I do sometimes use WSJT-X, but I've never modified it, so the fact that it is open source is meaningless to me. My log book application is Log4OM which is free, but closed source. There are a couple of changes that I would like to make to it and I would quite like it to be opened up, but it's no biggie. They do publish a simple API into it and I have fixed up a couple of my perceived wishes with simple external applications....

Martin (G8FXC)