st599
Well-Known Member
From the discussion on Home-made chart plotters
So what would you like to sea on your ideal boat computer?
So what would you like to sea on your ideal boat computer?
A Yachting Computer?
- Thread starter st599
- Start date
prv
Well-Known Member
Nothing - I go sailing to get away from computers
(Actually that's not strictly true; the tide app on my iPhone is a godsend for my drying berth. But we'll ignore that
)Pete
elton
Well-Known Member
OpenOffice
Apart from that I think you've covered everything.
But
I've got a Vodafone 3G dongle I use with my Asus netbook, and once it gets itself connected it's great. But getting connected is a frustrating, battery-depleting nightmare. I use the Betavine connection API. Firstly I have to remove my 8GB SD card, because the 3G connectivity software requires multiple USB ports (one of which maps to the SDHD port. Then I have to run a Betavine application to switch the 3G dongle from being a memory device to being a 3G dongle. Then I can run the 3G connection application. But if a do these actions too fast it all goes wrong. I either have to wait five minutes after running the switching application before running the connectivity application, or I have to open a system console and run dmesg to check the switching has completed before running the 3G application. The whole affair is totally naff.
So I want to see straightforward 3G connectivity. With a PAYG dongle.
Apart from that I think you've covered everything.
But
I've got a Vodafone 3G dongle I use with my Asus netbook, and once it gets itself connected it's great. But getting connected is a frustrating, battery-depleting nightmare. I use the Betavine connection API. Firstly I have to remove my 8GB SD card, because the 3G connectivity software requires multiple USB ports (one of which maps to the SDHD port. Then I have to run a Betavine application to switch the 3G dongle from being a memory device to being a 3G dongle. Then I can run the 3G connection application. But if a do these actions too fast it all goes wrong. I either have to wait five minutes after running the switching application before running the connectivity application, or I have to open a system console and run dmesg to check the switching has completed before running the 3G application. The whole affair is totally naff.
So I want to see straightforward 3G connectivity. With a PAYG dongle.
charles_reed
Well-Known Member
Use a decent mobile as the modem - the Huawei is a dog. Lacking sensitivity, a glutton for power and only gives decent connection speeds on 3G cells.
Having used both I have relegated the Huawei to those occasions (rare in Greece) where one has a genuine 3G signal, because my Nokia is only EDGE compliant.
PS On PAYG WIND - 1.5Gb/month foc, thereafter €0.04Mb.
BruceDanforth
Well-Known Member
3G dongles, if supported by the kernel - most of the Huwaii ones are- should be pretty straightforward. Just plug it in and run a dialler script on the modem that appears down in /dev somewhere.
elton
Well-Known Member
The mode switch is the problem. To use either the Xandros dialer script or the Betavine dialer it has to be in 'modem mode' (rather than memory stick mode). I haven't figured out what puts it into memory mode - it seems to be randomly in memory or modem mode when I first plug it in. It works perfectly and predictably under Vista. It's just that Betavine software that makes it a misery.
edit- there might well be an update to the Betavine software by now, but I haven't looked for ages because I got tired of farting about with it.
Last edited:
nimbusgb
Well-Known Member
........ and people wonder why there is still such a market for Windows.
The basic idea is sound. An installer CD that would squirt all the necessary onto the hardware and guarantee a working installation would go a long way towards getting this accepted.
The average bloke out there wants a solution, not hours of tinkering with drivers and tweaks of software. I love to do that sort of thing, in fact a holiday on the boat without DIY and tinkering is just plain torture. Lots of people on this forum are capable of doing this sort of thing but the mainstream sailor wants something that works out of the box.
Starting with a fixed set of hardware would be as important as getting the software onto a single DVD or .iso image. Say 3 motherboards, 10 screens and a variety of other hardware. All of which is tested for support so that someone can pick out what they want, bung in the cd and be up and running inside an hour, guaranteed.
I dare say that setting up something like SSH by default to support remote access with people available to hook in via the internet to help someone out might go a long way as well.
The basic idea is sound. An installer CD that would squirt all the necessary onto the hardware and guarantee a working installation would go a long way towards getting this accepted.
The average bloke out there wants a solution, not hours of tinkering with drivers and tweaks of software. I love to do that sort of thing, in fact a holiday on the boat without DIY and tinkering is just plain torture. Lots of people on this forum are capable of doing this sort of thing but the mainstream sailor wants something that works out of the box.
Starting with a fixed set of hardware would be as important as getting the software onto a single DVD or .iso image. Say 3 motherboards, 10 screens and a variety of other hardware. All of which is tested for support so that someone can pick out what they want, bung in the cd and be up and running inside an hour, guaranteed.
I dare say that setting up something like SSH by default to support remote access with people available to hook in via the internet to help someone out might go a long way as well.
michael_w
Well-Known Member
Rugged, like a Tough Book. Runs on 12v not some daft voltage.
BruceDanforth
Well-Known Member
I don't understand really. Mine appears as a memory stick and a modem simultaneously. I connect with it using wvdial from a bash prompt and don't need any Betavine software or anything else.
st599
Well-Known Member
I've set up an online wiki at: http://yachtix.wikispaces.com/Base+System
Plan for the moment is to concentrate on Intel i386 32bit Live CD.
I've based the CD on Lubuntu - http://lubuntu.net/ - an LXDE based Ubuntu distro (because it still works with Remastersys) a list of the included software is shown at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu/Applications
Anyone can add comments to the wiki pages (Go to Discusions on top of the page of interest and hit New Post)
Idea at present is to:
1) Get a list of software that people would want on this liveCD
2) Write an install script for each piece of software
In the future:
3) Look at customisations to the UI
4) Scripts for things like weekly antivirus scans, auto encoding of video files etc.
Plan for the moment is to concentrate on Intel i386 32bit Live CD.
I've based the CD on Lubuntu - http://lubuntu.net/ - an LXDE based Ubuntu distro (because it still works with Remastersys) a list of the included software is shown at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu/Applications
Anyone can add comments to the wiki pages (Go to Discusions on top of the page of interest and hit New Post)
Idea at present is to:
1) Get a list of software that people would want on this liveCD
2) Write an install script for each piece of software
In the future:
3) Look at customisations to the UI
4) Scripts for things like weekly antivirus scans, auto encoding of video files etc.
BruceDanforth
Well-Known Member
How is this progressing? Do you have an ISO image yet?
st599
Well-Known Member
Getting there - got a Lubuntu image working in VirtualBox. Can run a remastersys sometime soon and have an .iso image created.
Got three or four more bits of software to install, then will have a play making an iso.
Ubergeekian
Well-Known Member
If the computer is low-powered enough for Xubuntu to be worthwhile, I'd suggest Abiword and Gnumeric instead of OpenOffice. They're both excellent and very much faster.
For a browser (on anything) I'd recommend Chrome instead of Firefox, which is now a bloated, leaky, insecure, unstable piece of rubbish and makes MS software look pretty good.