Hello Mike, > I spent around 3 months in Linux Hell trying to get Linrad going > and vowed that Linux would never again run on any machine I own. I > plan to keep that vow.
>From the conversations we had, only two mails in my files, my impression is that you had no difficulties with Linux. Everything was related to Linrad. Linrad is very different from Winrad, it is far more complicated to use and it can be set up for many different purposes. From what you wrote my impression is that you found Linrad useless because it was too complicated - but that has nothing to do with the operating system. You can run Linrad under Windows if you want to avoid "Linux Hell" but it would have changed nothing. Linrad behaves exactly the same and puts the same requirements on the user regardless of the operating system. Linrad will allow reception of signals that you can not receive with Winrad or any other receiver in case you have heavy powerline noise at the same time as you have strong local signals close in frequency. It does not come for free. Linrad is not mature enough to do everything automatically for you. The reason is that I am looking for usages that we not yet have the hardware for and I have purpously made Linrad make no assumption about what hardware the user might have connected. Generally Linux is far easier to install than Windows if you have found a scrap computer with unknown hardware inside. I have solid experience with Linux, Win 98 and Win 2000. To make Windows work one has to find out what the hardware really is, then one might be lucky to find drivers on the Internet. With Linux everything is usually included and installed automatically. It is of course very different with new computers where the manufacturer supplies a CD with Windows drivers for exactly the hardware you bought. Linux may not have them (yet) and that is surely a problem. Have a look here: http://www.sm5bsz.com/linuxdsp/install/distrib.htm Linrad runs under every Linux distribution that I have tested (29 of them) and I have no reason to believe it would not run on any other distribution. I have tried several computers from Pentium 133 MHz up to modern ones. Surely there are difficulties in installing modern Linux distributions on old computers that do not have enough memory - but Windows is not difficult, it is simply impossible. Linux has better real-time properties as compared to Windows 2000 (and Win 98 is bad) I only have Windows XP on modern laptops so I do not know if it is better. (I refuse to pay for making a test with XP on elderly computers) On modern computers any operating system is perfectly adequate for SDR at bandwidths of 100 kHz and below so it does not really matter. I do not think the OS as such is much of a problem. The real problem is how to find well working drive routines for the better hardware that we will get in the future. If manufacturers decide to keep the internal architecture secret and just supply a CD with drivers for Windows Vista we will have to use it until we have software that emulates Vista for the drive routines. This is what we have to do to make modern WLAN cards work under Linux..... 73 Leif / SM5BSZ _______________________________________________ Winrad mailing list [email protected] http://winrad.org/mailman/listinfo/winrad_winrad.org
