Re: [amsat-bb] Re: UO-2 Telemetry Decoder Software

["Edward R. Cole" <al7eb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From: Hamish Moffatt <hamish@cloud.net.au>
>On Tue, Jan 02, 2001 at 05:48:33PM -0700, Bdale Garbee wrote:
>> In the midst of that, I sent him a thought-piece email that he ended up 
>> printing a chunk of, in which I suggested that worrying about what OS hams 
>> might have on their "main" computer wasn't very relevant for deciding what
>> platform to target for software we would run in the shack.  My
hypothesis was
>> that hams would want to dedicate a separate machine for the shack, and
there 
>> was no reason to cripple it with an appliance operating system.  Our hobby 
>> has a long history of hacking/tinkering, and we ought to foster that same 
>> behavior with regards to software.  Open source platforms are emminently 
>> hackable, and therefore, I believe, are a better match to our hobby
efforts.
>> 
>> I took flak for saying that.  Some people thought I was elitist for
assuming
>> more than one computer per household.  

Well, guys n gals I'm not sure what his thread has to do with subject line,
but...

>From: Hamish:
>This from the same people who own several radios with combined
>value well over the cost of a middle-of-the-range new PC, no doubt.

I resemble that :-)  Up till yesterday I had much more invested in radios
than the single lonely little P100 I bought in 1996.  It did pretty good
running a lot of DSP programs, trackers, psk-31, etc. with only 8 mb
ram...buuuut reaaal slooow!  Then I got a really wild idea and installed 32
more mb...and it came back to life.

Well, as of yesterday it is no longer lonely.  My new P3-866 with 128 mb of
133 MHz sdram arrived from Dell.  Of course it has the latest win2000 OS.
So now that I have a two-computer household, little P100 can lose all the
memory hogging win apps and be happy running my dedicated ham-shack
shareware programs.  BUT, they are mostly DOS based programs.  Now if I
want to join the "Brave new world" of Linux can I still use my old
favorites, or...do I have to hire one of you crackerjack compooter jocks to
rewrite everything to this new OS thingy?  Translation spend $$$

Its fine and good we have all this software talent out there, but what am
I, an unliterate non-software developer "apps" user to do?  Where's my DSP,
NOVA, InstaTrack, IntaTune, Excell spreadsheets, {and several others I'll
spare you with in the name of brevity} etc. for Linux?

BTW can I run both win95 and Linux on my old P100?  Or do I have to
uninstall windows completely.  This is a pretty big learning curve I'm
facing if I want to play with the gang.  I'd really rather learn the latest
RF development tools and build microwave goodies!  An analog kind of guy!

Ed

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