[drats_users] SeaPac

[Dean Gibson AE7Q]

On 2013-05-28 11:13, Dan Smith wrote:
>>   Should D-Rats run on Win98/SE?
> Nope, D-RATS requires an operating system and neither of those products qualify, IMHO :)
>
> This has always been the case. The last editions of these DOS-based GUIs were EOL'd by Microsoft in 2006, two years before D-RATS showed up.  GTK hasn't provided builds that run on Win9x for a long time. There is no way to run those environments securely, nor with a*modern*  enough browser to do anything useful.
>
> It's time to let go... :)

The browser (IE 6) works fine on Win 98.  My problem is not Win 98, but 
having a relatively small (eg, *portable*) device that can send/receive 
D-Star low-speed data.  They don't need to be secure; they are not 
connecting to the Internet.  I'd update these laptops in a second to Win 
XP, but I doubt they'd run XP with only 96MB of RAM.  These laptops also 
dual-boot to Fedora Core 5;  do you have an RPM for Fedora Core 5?

Yes, I could go buy two more modern laptops, but I'm not inclined to do 
that for a trade show just in order to run D-Rats, since Win 98 runs all 
of the rest of the D-Star and related communications software (including 
new Icom software) that I need.  At home, I have three Windows computers 
that are fully capable of running D-Rats.

My *modern *choice for a portable D-Star data solution would be an 
Android device (I have eight) ... but D-Rats isn't there (yet).  Someone 
suggested a "Linux on Android" solution, but I have my doubts that the 
GUI interface would work ... More promising is 
http://code.google.com/p/python-for-android/ , but then there's the 
problem of GTK for Android (apparently not available).

In order to connect an Android device to a D-Star serial port, one needs 
an Android device with a USB port that is (or can be) configured for USB 
host mode.  If one uses the typical tablet USB slave port as a 
connection and then is able to configure it for USB host mode, then in 
order to be useful for more than a short period, it also needs a 
separate connection for power.  My two Acer Iconia A500 tablets (Android 
4.0) meet those requirements (although one of them died last week ...), 
and indeed I can send/receive D-Star data with them, but only in a text 
window.

Of course, there's always a Windows 8 tablet, but my guess is that you 
don't recommend that ... (nor would I).


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