The battle of the OS’s

For the past few weeks / months I’ve been trying various Linux based operating systems that would run reasonably well on my very outdated fleet of computer hardware. I have a HP 210 netbook in absolutely excellent, well looked after, condition. It has 1 GB of memory which immediately disqualifies it from participating in any IT environment for the future. The best I could do was load Debian 12 using the very lightweight desktop environment LXQT. Another limiting factor of the netbook is it’s 1024 x 768 screen resolution. It just doesn’t fit in anymore ….. Sadly so. Packed away.

Two old ProBook 4510’s were donated to me. These laptops also have DVD drives. You don’t see that anymore. The CPU’s are Intel Duo Core’s and once ran Windows 7 which in my opinion was the best Microsoft operating system ever. Windows 3.11 in the very beginning was also good but anything in between and after version 7 was in my view mostly irritating, OK windows 95 was good too. Versions 8, 10 and 11 take the cake! Thank goodness Linux has reached the stages it has.

I loaded the latest Linux Mint version 21.3 on the one ProBook running the XCFE desktop just to make it reasonably usable response wise. This machine has keyboard problems and a dead battery system but as long as inverter power is available it runs as well as can be accepted. It’s used for ham radio and digital modes. I also use a wireless USB keyboard which allows me some movement in the “shack” and less prone to the RF floating around there.

On the other ProBook I loaded Chrome OS Flex. This system is very integrated with anything to do with Google but so is my Android cell phone! In fact using the ProBook is a more user friendly way of interacting with anything web based and way better than a cell phone. The Android phone needs to be there though if using WhatsApp or for the reception of SMS’s which are mostly a channel for scammers or constant advertising from the network provider, cell c, in my case. If only I could rid myself of that but there are important uses for SMS messaging too.

I have another laptop which I use for website programming (Javascript / PHP / MySQL etc. ) and Lazarus IDE. This machine has 4GB of memory, runs Debian 12 and uses the Gnome desktop. It’s OK for what it’s used for. I tried running Android Studio. This appears to need some real heavyweight hardware so totally out of my league for the moment.

So who won the battle of the OS’s? Well, Chrome OS Flex for sure for day to day computing! If I need to do any development work then I’ll haul out the Debian based I3, it comes in second.

Unable to initialise OpenSSL library

I try to program using Lazarus IDE because it’s pretty cross platform and because my grandson uses Delphi doing Information Technology in high school. This year is his last before he goes out into the world of programming.

I had the problem of my RaDAR Log application not being able to initialise the OpenSSL library while trying to upload the local ADIF to the Online Community Logbook. After many weeks I tried loading libssl-dev onto Linux Mint and the problem was solved!

Chrome OS Flex takes no prisoners

I had this troublesome windows 7 operating system built from my only backup from an old laptop machine that had died. I also installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed next to the windows OS. It didn’t like Google Chrome installs and I didn’t like the results either. I was able to load FL-Digi and FL-Rig from it’s repository though.

I found Chrome OS Flex while browsing You Tube. The boot USB stick is created using an extension loaded on the Chrome browser and I had to use the one legged windows OS to do that. It took a while and took me past midnight last night, downloading, verifying, unpacking, verifying again until I had a stick with an image on it.

Yes, Flex takes no prisoners, it WIPES the hard drive which suited me fine and windows and suse saw that last light as they were wiped off the disk of the old ProBook 4510s.

It’s fast, supports anything Google based and fine for a browsing machine for anything on the Internet. The old ProBook has found a new purpose.

Installing Linux gives many more options but I already have Linux Mint running on another ProBook that has a dead battery but the household SunSynk inverter and solar system keeps it on life support and a working computer system for the back room shack.

So two of these old die hards now have been repurposed. I’m happy that they will give a few more years of service in their new form and none of them will ever see windows again!

Linux CAT Control on the Icom 7200

I got finally fed up with Windows. I kept the operating system simply because I believed the IC-7200 CAT control was only possible with Windows. I have a few old laptops that all once had Windows installed on them until they became unusable.

I had Linux Mint 20.03 installed on one of them and so began the journey. I downloaded WSJT-X, FL-Digi and FL-Rig.

FL-Rig is really at the heart of it all. The USB port where the Icom IC-7200 was plugged into (It has a built in digital modes sound card / CAT interface) just needed to be identified and the sound card too. My FL-Rig rig and PTT settings are as follows :

WSJT-X and FL-Digi are both excellent digital modes processors, more than just a “program”! My WSJT-X rig, PTT and audio settings are as follows:

Last but certainly not least, for all this to work you need to allow your user name to be part of the Dialout group. In the terminal, give access through the following command:

This should allow perfect CAT control and excellent digital modes communications with the Icom 7200. Please check your audio settings especially monitoring the ALC level that it only just kicks in.

OK CW is my mode of choice but really great the digital modes setup is running under Linux and I am eventually rid of the shackles of Windows!

Look out for me on WSPR too, I love doing propagation tests with it.