[aprssig] xastir vs. oziexplorer

[Jason Winningham]

On Jul 16, 2006, at 3:01 PM, Laidlaw, Andrew wrote:

> Xastir is free, and can be problematic to get running initially

How much trouble depends a lot on how much experience you have  
building Unix applications from source, and how many of the extra  
features (mostly map formats) you wish to build with xastir.  I find  
it pretty easy to deal with, but I've been doing unix support for  
over 15 years, so I may not be the best judge on how much trouble  
you'll have. (:

Building Xastir itself is borderline trivial, as long as you are  
satisfied with APRSdos maps.  Xastir depends on other libraries for  
reading other map formats, and how much trouble it is to get these  
libraries compiled depends on which platform/distribution you use.  A  
"generic" linux distro will typically be the least trouble to build.

After it's up and running, xastir is as reliable as anything I run on  
my systems, and I have high standards.  I've had over a year of  
uptime on various systems (including an NFS/NIS/email server that  
serves ~1000 users).  I consider any application or OS that needs  
restarting/rebooting in order to maintain reliable operation to have  
serious flaws.

I keep two copies of xastir running (one at home and one at work)  
24x7x365, and they perform well.  I have had occasional crashes in  
the past, but that was with a bleeding edge release.  Even xastir's  
latest development release is typically _very_ stable.

-Jason
kg4wsv