[drats_users] SeaPac
Dean Gibson AE7Q
Tue May 28 14:24:11 PDT 2013
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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