[aprssig] New Open Source APRS Client Project

[Tom Russo]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 09:43:31AM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kg4wsv at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 8:08 AM, Brian Webster
> <bwebster at wirelessmapping.com> wrote:
> >
> >        I tried the Virtual machine version last night with VMWare on my Dell
> > Latitude laptop using a built in wireless card. It would not recognize the
> > card and/or the network interface properly so I have no networking on the
> > Virtual Machine.
> 
> There are a couple of ways to network a VM.  The one you apparently
> used was to allow the VM to take over the host machine's network
> hardware.
> 
> A better way, IMO, is to allow VMware to set up a configuration much
> like you would use at home on a DSL router, and share that network
> interface with the VM.  Sorry, I haven't done it in a while so I'm
> even forgetting the VMware terminology.

The VM that is linked to on the Xastir wiki's HowTo:VMware page is supposed
to be set up to use the virtual machine's network interface in NAT mode,
which I believe is what you're referring to.  Attempting to use it in 
"Bridged" mode won't always work, depending on the real network adapter's
drivers (for example, when using a Linux host and an atheros-chipset 
wireless card, bridged networking does not work with vmware).

In NAT mode, the virtual machine and the host machine share a single IP
address, Windows (or whatever the host is) is completely in charge of
the physical interface, and the virtual machine doesn't care *what* the
hardware is.  In bridge mode, the virtual machine and host machine act 
like two separate machines with different IP addresses, and while it's 
still not supposed to be the case that the virtual machine knows about the
physical hardware, the driver on the host side needs to support bridging.

Brian: if you downloaded "Xastir-Hardy_080516.zip" and you still had this 
problem, please contact me off-line and I'd like to help either get you
running or fix the VM so it does the right thing, as I had intended it to
work with NAT out of the box.  If you used some other VM with Xastir, try
changing the network interface to NAT instead of Bridged or Host-Only.

Your point about dedicating a whole lotta disk space for the virtual machine 
is well taken, but porting Xastir to native windows is a massive task, pretty 
much requiring a complete rewrite.  The much-talked-about-never-worked-on 
Xastir 2.0, written properly with a more portable windowing toolkit than 
Motif, would be suitable for that.  But so far it's all talk, as nobody
has time to start such a huge task.  We're all too busy using and
tweaking Xastir 1.x.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "It's so simple to be wise: just think of something stupid to say and
  then don't say it."  --- Sam Levinson