[pskmail] Re: New live distro test report

  • From: Rein Couperus PA0R <rein@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: pskmail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 21:56:55 +0200

Hi Per,

I have been able to do a quick test today. Here are my impressions on
the ASUS laptop(512 M, 1.4 GHz AMD Sempron):

* The distro now starts into the guest user without intervention
* You have to switch off the TX as after the boot there is a nice
'fanfare' causing qrm on the frequency :)
* The numlock is ON by default, which has made me wonder why I could not
input the root password :) This must be default OFF in my opinion.
* My memory stick is recognized and mounted under /mnt/win_e/sda4. Is
this standard? (important for the data loading script).
* The network is now working with my Pro/Wireless 2200.
* I have not yet found out how to switch to a mono font, which would be
good for showing tables in both gMFSK and PSKmail displays.

My Compaq M700 cannot handle the gMFSK/Soundcard connection. It
generates periodic errors in the data stream. No interruptions but
corrupted characters. I can see that when I send a field full of
blanks... I can see lines formed consisting of corrupted characters.
Average, every 6th character is broken, on TX only. Reception is
perfectly ok. I have tried different settings on the soundcard levels
but unfortunately no joy yet... I plays hard rock MP3's ok...

* I'd like to see some small scripts startable from the desktop, located
in the home dir of guest:

start.pl
========
#! /usr/bin/perl -w

print `pwd`;
if (-e "/mnt/win_e/pskmail.tar.gz") {
        print "File ok\n";
        print "Copying permanent info from your stick\n";

        eval {
                `cp /mnt/win_e/pskmail.tar.gz ./`;
                print "Unpacking archive\n";
                `tar --overwrite -zxf pskmail.tar.gz`;
        };
        if (@$) {
                print @$;
        } else {
                print "Done. \nYou can start gMFSK and PSKmail now...\n";
        }
        sleep 5;

} else {
        print "cannot find the data\n";
}


finish.pl
=========
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
print "Saving your data to the stick\n";
`tar zcvf pskmail.tar.gz mail .evolution .kde .gconf`;
eval {
        `cp pskmail.tar.gz /mnt/win_e`;
};
if (@$) {
        print @$;
}
sleep 2;

These make the data for PSKmail, gMFSK and Evolution permanent.
Only thing I don't know is if the mount point is the same every time and
for every USB drive size...
Under Morphix I had developed a method to automatically load the data
from the stick at boot time, don't know if that is also possible under
Mandriva.

It would also be good to 'perm' the network parameters!! As /etc is only
writeable by root, maybe a root cron job would do it?

All in all, this is looking quite good already!!

73,

Rein PA0R

> 
> As always I am very grateful for test reports, if you for instance
> miss something in there then I can pretty easily add and release
> a new version.
> 
> 73 de Per, sm0rwo
> 
> 
> 


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