On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Cees Tool wrote:

It's a bit quiet here now, but maybe some 'suse' ham-info or problems will appear here soon.

Sure they will appear :-) I have thousand of questions, but congratulations to SuSE and especially their HAM's for the nearly complete HOWTO's - as long i can find my answers there i see no reason to ask here :-) 73 Stephan, DK8LV -- Join http://www.dk0wcy.de for ONLINE Magnetometer, our Earthmagnetic Aurora Beacon project. [] dk8lv@dk8lv.net [eMail] [] dk8lv@dk8lv.ampr.org [ampr.org Mail 44.130.127.14] [] dk8lv@db0fhf.ampr.org [eMail+ampr.org 193.175.189.174 44.130.127.111] [] dk8lv@db0hes.#slh.deu.eu [AX.25 BBS]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 08:35:27AM +0200, Jean-Paul ROUBELAT wrote:

What about : - automatic/semi-automatic configuration - hardware and interrupts detection - installation scripts - ???

I know, this may be a dream, but if nobody dreams, nothing will happen !

Well it doesn't detect anything autmatically, but we have a script called ax25-config and a simplifyied howto which covers installation using this script. Url is http://1409.org/projects/ax25-config.html. Unfortunally I don't have the time to maintain it at the moment, but sometime in winter I plan to finish tcp/ip and net/rom installation. 73s Hans-Peter -- Hans-Peter Zorn, Karlsruhe, Germany http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uhsm/ hpz@gmx.net (preferred) http://1409.org/people/hp/ hp@1409.org (hamradio stuff)

On Sat, Oct 14, Jean-Paul ROUBELAT wrote:

I think most people will agree that it's really a pain for beginners to configure and start ax25 under LINUX.

Agreed. :-}

To have the kernel already compiled and the apps and tools installed is already a good thing, but this is only 30% of the job.

Some task they don't understand :

- how to (and why) load the modules - what is a start script (and how to write/modify/configure it) - what to run and what to configure in the start script - how to edit and change the (multiple) configuration files - what driver to use for each hardware - and so on...

What do you think is best: To install and configure this atuff auto- magically without bothering the user of what is done in the background, i.e. with YaST/2 or to improve the documentation perhaps by rewriting the whole stuff and to concentrate on the main issues?

I know there is already a ax25 how-to, but if we could help beginners to have a system running ax25 without spending weeks and headaches, this should help them a lot.

What about : - automatic/semi-automatic configuration - hardware and interrupts detection - installation scripts - ???

Please help me because I am ignorant in this case: How do you autodetect a TNC connected to the serial port? What I can think of is to autodetect all PCI-or PCMCIA-based cards, e.g. the new PCI-SCC card from Baycom. But how to deal with the remaining (bigger) part of ham hardware? Apart from these maybe small problems this is exactly what I want to do in the future.

I know, this may be a dream, but if nobody dreams, nothing will happen !

My dream is to call YaST/2, install the hardware drivers and configure them within one step and off you go. This would be really smooth! 73, Kai -- Kai Altenfelder, SuSE GmbH, Schanzaeckerstr. 10, D-90443 Nuernberg Tel.: +49-911-74053-0, Fax: +49-911-74053-489, EMail: ka@suse.de Ham: DL3LBA PGP public key available

On Mon, Oct 16, kevcav wrote:

Greetings to the group. I am one of these experienced who has learned the haard way.

Spent 8 weeks trying to compile a kernel for AX25 support. The fatal mistake was simply failing to move the original modules out of the way before the " make modules"

Err, you would not have neede to do so: Our kernel has each and every module compiled including the ax25 support. There is no need for compiling the kernel yourself, as far as ax25 is concerned.

During this time I discovered Slackware and the AX25 modeules precompiled into the kernel. This distro got me going on AX25 and ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Hm, do they compile the drivers hard into the kernel or do they ship them as modules?

gave me the confidence that I was not a total dummy. After reading a post in linux-ham where the "move the modules" was mentioned I was able to sucessfully recompile the kernel.

So as a basic first step the option of being able to use an AX25 aware kernel would help.

It is there, now and since SuSE Linux 6.1 in the past. Regards, Kai -- Kai Altenfelder, SuSE GmbH, Schanzaeckerstr. 10, D-90443 Nuernberg Tel.: +49-911-74053-0, Fax: +49-911-74053-489, EMail: ka@suse.de Ham: DL3LBA PGP public key available

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 11:49:44AM +0200, Joerg Reuter wrote:

There is a start of a configuration script on http://www.1409.org/projects/ax25-config.html The problem is, however, that the script for the user interface also writes the startup script instead of just dumping the configuration variables to a file. I'd like to see a more flexible solution.

This is true, however the configuration is also dumped into a configuration file /etc/ax25-config.conf which can be sourced by a shell-script (using . /etc/ax25-config.conf). Actually once I had a generic start/stop script which used this file. It is definitely possible to write such a script without having to change ax25-config itself. Mirko favored the hardcoded up/down scripts because people can tweak them if they have special needs. The main problem with ax25-config is that it is written as shell script which results in rather unreadable code. I would like to rewrite it in python and give it (optionally) a graphical interface. But currently a have no spare time to do so.

...

Please help me because I am ignorant in this case: How do you autodetect a TNC connected to the serial port?

It's tricky due to the great number of different firmware implementations and you have to take care not to accidently send UI frames while probing the hardware. Worse, there's one case you cannot detect: pure KISS TNCs.

par96, serial baycom, yam etc aren't easy to detect either. Even worse, yam and flexepp can be programmed and I don't know if probing could damage these devices.

...

My dream is to call YaST/2, install the hardware drivers and configure them within one step and off you go. This would be really smooth!

Indeed!

I would prefer a distribution independend approach. I is great that SuSE is supporting ham radio in its distribution but I don't think that _all_ hams will switch to SuSE (i am in love with debian, sorry ;) and as (ham-) developer resources are limited it would be better to collaborate and to come up with a distibution independent solution. -hp -- Hans-Peter Zorn, Karlsruhe, Germany http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uhsm/ hpz@gmx.net (preferred) http://1409.org/people/hp/ hp@1409.org (hamradio stuff)

On Mon, Oct 16, 2000 at 02:09:16PM +0200, Joerg Reuter wrote:

- a couple of front ends that just read and write a central configuration file such as /etc/ax25/ax25-config.conf :-) Yes XML would be nice, Tom does use it for its new soundmodem. But it is hard to do in bash ;), should be easy using python/expat however.

- probably a couple of helper applications that can generate the files in /etc/ax25/ (Similar to the things SuSEconfig or debconf does, but independent of it) You can easily split the function which does generate the configuration-files from the UI. They are completely independent. I will do that after my maths examination (beginning of november).

- a single start/stop script that parses this config file Must search my hard-disk. The problem is that the configuration of the ax25-drivers is very different for each driver. You need _lots_ of logic in this script. As I said, I had such a thing already but then Mirko and me merged our projects. My script supported multiple interfaces, but it got very complex.

- the start/stop script should be able to source additional user-defined scripts Easy one, just use run-parts /etc/ax25/init/ (or is this debian-specific, I hope not...)

Result: maximum flexibility, user friendly, maintainable, upgradeable, ...

Sounds nice, but is a lot of work. This is why I am currently pushing ax25-config a little. Sure, it isn't very nice implementation-wise and a little bit annoying to maintain and extend but it works right now and does support a rather wide range of devices. (actually extending isn't that hard because config-file-templates, configuration and CUI are rather seperate). As i mentioned, I am rather busy with uni at the moment and we are preparing the next LinKT-release (mainly documentation) which has higher priority for me. -hp -- Hans-Peter Zorn, Karlsruhe, Germany http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uhsm/ hpz@gmx.net (preferred) http://1409.org/people/hp/ hp@1409.org (hamradio stuff)

On Mon, Oct 16, Hans-Peter Zorn wrote:

...

...

My dream is to call YaST/2, install the hardware drivers and configure them within one step and off you go. This would be really smooth!

Indeed!

I would prefer a distribution independend approach. I is great that SuSE is supporting ham radio in its distribution but I don't think that _all_ hams will switch to SuSE (i am in love with debian, sorry ;) and as (ham-) developer resources are limited it would be better to collaborate and to come up with a distibution independent solution.

Hm, does that mean we won't reach world domination? Just kidding... ;) Yes, of course the approach should be standardized and distribution independent. But as we work for SuSE our focus will naturally be on a perfect integration into _our_ distribution. That does not mean that we want to create proprietary solutions but in the opposite choose a modular approach, like Jörg wrote: Create a framework of configuration usable for all distributions and a bunch of specific frontends like a YaST module or something else. Everybody is welcome to work together with us on such a modular framework, even if s/he is using Debian like you. ;) Regards, Kai -- Kai Altenfelder, SuSE GmbH, Schanzaeckerstr. 10, D-90443 Nuernberg Tel.: +49-911-74053-0, Fax: +49-911-74053-489, EMail: ka@suse.de Ham: DL3LBA PGP public key available