LHS Episode #063: South of the Border

by Black Sparrow Media Episode #63 Duration: 00:56:12

Hello, new and faithful listeners. Welcome to the sixty-first-eth installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. If anyone has been paying attention lately, a lot of podcasters are packing up their gear and moving on to other things. Many more have moved into much more irregular release cycles. We on the other hand are coming back stronger than ever. New releases are on the way. We'll be back to every two weeks starting with Episode #062 and we're hitting our stride again. We may not be the best or most listened to podcast out there but at least we still are a podcast. So thanks for tuning in, as always, and please let your ham radio and Linux enthusiast friends know about us. Linux in the Ham Shack lives on. ¡Vámonos!

Promo:

  • Ohio LinuxFest will be held September 9-11, 2011 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, OH.

  • Linux in the Ham Shack promo from the Low SWR guys. Thanks!

Announcements:

  • Our best wishes for a speedy recovery to MadamMoo!

  • Our regular hosts are joined by Torsten, XE2/K5TOR.

Topics:

  • Firefox 4 has been out a while, and version 5 beta is available at the time of recording. Our hosts discuss. The first thing Russ noted, was the increase in speed! Look for versions 6 and 7 before the end of the year. (As I write this, version 6 has been released. -Ed.)

  • Kudos to The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) and their interest in amateur radio. One of the hosts, Joel, aka “gorkon”, W3RAZ, has recorded a couple podcasts for Hacker Public Radio: Episode #738 is an introduction to amateur radio, and Episode #756 explains the basics of radio. Another TLLTS host, Allan, is N3MAW.

  • Leo LaPorte of This Week in Tech has started a podcast about amateur radio. (It’s Ham Nation with Bob Heil, K9EID, and Gordon West, WB6NOA, under the TWiT banner and with Leo’s support and occasional participation. By the time you read this, Leo has his license and is now W6TWT. -Ed.)

  • Russ describes the Linux from Scratch project that provides instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code. Russ plans on providing more details of his experience with Linux from Scratch on a future episode of the QSK Netcast.

  • Our hosts tried Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal, and discuss it, good and bad.

  • Russ also tried Fedora 15, and liked the default desktop environment.

  • Richard likes PCLinuxOS, and SUSE Linux.

  • Linux Mint gets a mention, too.

  • In future LHS episodes, look for information about svxlink, an EchoLink client for Linux, and codec2, an Open Source and patent-free audio codec.

  • Torsten has had problems installing CQRLog on a 64-bit machine. Russ recommends installing the ia32-libs package to provide the needed 32-bit libraries. In Debian-based distributions, you can install that package with the command “apt-get install ia32-libs”. More information about running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit machine with Debian-based Linux is here.

Contact Info:

Music:

  • “Vacancy” by Assembly Line Gods, from their album Control (Volume 1).

  • The music in Episode #063 is provided with kind permission by Assembly Line Gods from their recent EP release, Control (Volume 1). The track is called “Vacancy.” Follow ALG on Twitter and Facebook and buy their new tracks at iTunes. Thanks, guys!