[OZAPRS] RE: FW: Ubuntu Xastir Help

[Peter Bye]

Thanks Tony,

I installed the KDE, and it is working great guns.  Now I just have to learn
my way around KDE!!
Now that Xastir is working properly, it gives me something to play with and
learn now

Cheers again
Pete

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Hunt [mailto:wavetel at internode.on.net] 
Sent: Sunday, 8 June 2008 3:48 PM
To: ozaprs at aprs.net.au
Cc: vk1nfi at netspace.net.au
Subject: Re: FW: Ubuntu Xastir Help

Peter,

Firstly congrats on taking a risk trying something different.. Maybee you
have an answer allready to this one..

I cant see your screen shot as the mail group does not allow attachments but
I am guessing as to what it is your looking at.. Its what I call the "Cigar
problem" perhaps. When opening the menus many of them may produce a smallish
cigar shaped window.. Very small.

If so then its probably to do with the restricted drivers.. Specifically
Video. I recomend joining the xastir mail list for starters if you have not
allready.
http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir

Ive recently started using the LSB (Linux standard Base) Binary of xastir as
its reasonably easy to install and update and is a very recent version (1.92
currently)

Back to the cigar problem. Here is an extract from mailings on the xastir
list of recent times.

Sorry about the length of all this.. See below.. Hopr this helps..


Some more on the Cigar problem. Ive listed my findings below. After reading
other recent postings on this one one can see some of the relavant issues.
Particularly the presence of the restricted drivers for video.

The problem in short is the appearance of a small cigar shaped object in
place only some of the proper menus when trying to acess certain menus.The
Interfaces menu is an example of this and is probably the most annoying one.
The cigar object is completely useless and all you can do is close it.

Here is my setup. Athlon 1800XP CPU with 1.2 Gigs of ram running Ubuntu 7.10
with a Nvidia FX5500 video card with 256Megs of ram on board. Xastir is
v1.93 LSB Binary version.

Here are the results of the different situations/configurations.

Gnome desktop with restricted drivers- You get the Cigar object in place of
the selected menu.
Gnome desktop with restricted drivers disabled- All works fine.
KDE desktop with or without restricted drivers- All works fine.
XFCE desktop with or without restricted drivers- All works fine.

So the problem relates to restricted video drivers under Gnome only. To me
this is a minor hassle because Gnome is just not my favorite desktop. Is it
the restricted drivers or is it Gnome or is it Xastir that is at fault here
? It is certainly curious that xastir can get most of the other Menus to
work correctly. Whats so special and different about the interfaces menu for
example ? Is this problem unique to Ubuntu ?

Some work arounds involve configuring Xastir with the restricted drivers
disabled (which requires a reboot every time) or just editing the
xastir.conf file manually. Perhaps if you dont want to install KDE and
configure it there then think about installing the Xfce desktop which is
relatively light weight even compared to Gnome and configure Xastir from
there.

Here are some relavant URLs that I found handy.
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/kde installing KDE
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/xubuntu installing Xfce

Once xastir is configured as you want it you can by and large use it with no
real issues under Gnome with the restricted video driver. Access to most of
the menus works fine for me.

Although Ive focused on the Interfaces menu there may be other menus
affected also. When I disabled the restricted video driver and eventually
reenabled , it went off and downloaded the drivers again off the Internet.
Presumably the latest version. Briefly after this it all seemed to work fine
under Gnome but has since resumed with the Cigars.


Tony Hunt VK5AH

----- Original Message ----- 

> Firstly..
>
> I am a complete newbie on Ubuntu and Xastir so any advice, can you please
> put it into raw bone speak please.. hihi
>
> I have just loaded Ubuntu 8.04 onto my Laptop cause I wanted something
> different to play with.  Then I loaded Xastir, herin lies my problem.
> I installed it using the Synaptic Package Manager, which seems to work
fine.
> Then I flashed it up, and tried to open the interface manager in order to
> get things working, however, every time I try to open the manager (or
pretty
> much anything else for that matter) all I get is what is in the attached
> screen print.  Anyone have any idea what is going on?  I cannot expand or
> maximise that window at all.
>
> Also, can someone tell me how to get Xastir as a desktop icon or into the
> Applications menu?
>
> Cheers
>
> Pete VK1NFI / VK2MPJ


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