Working on setting up the Evolve 3 Maestro aka the Jankapotamus

· k0hbk's blog

Yesterday and today I've been working on setting up a cheap $80 dollar laptop, the Eolve 3 Maestro, which I got from Mirocenter. The laptop specs themselves are nothing special. In fact the sales-person at Microcenter initially tried to warn me away from purchasing the laptop until I mentioned I'd be installing linux on it.

And sure enough, first thing I did when I got home, is I whiped the Windows install and overwrote it with Manjaro and set up i3 Window manager for a very low resource usage window manager/desktop environment.

WSJTX-Improved & Grid Tracker 2 #

Next I proceeded with installing wsjtx-improved and GridTracker2 which were pretty easy using Manjaro's pamac installer tool and granting access to the AUR (Arch User Repository) for additional user-supported packages (beyond the distro supported lackage list). There are community maintained packages for wsjtx-improved and GridTracker2 that pamac installed without any fuss.

Initial VARA setup #

From there I proceeded with trying to install Vara via Bottles. Since Vara is only natively supported on Windows, installing Vara requires the use of Wine which is a Windows compatability layer for Linux. Using wine directly is a bit of a pain however so another project called Bottles has been created to help with the setup of Wine environments. Wine environemnts are functionally a "Windows filesystem" with all the various Windows dependencies installed into it. In order to use an app you use Bottles to run the Windows installer which will install the program into the Wine environment. To get things working I followed this guide which was very helpful, as when I tried on my own with the default "Runner", it was failing to install some dependencies when creating the Wine environment. Once I got everything installed, I was able to launch VaraFM and VaraHF. I paused there, and will need to come back to figuring out how to interface with a radio, which will be semi-nontrivial given that Windows uses one COM port abstraction and linux does not, thus they are not immediately compatible with one another.

AX25 #

Instead of continuing with VARA I switched over to trying to install the ax25 libraries and apps. I followed the guide by TheModernHam though my setup is a bit different as I am usinga VGC vr-n76 which has native KISS-over-bluetuth support so I did not need to run/setup Direwolf.

I did need to also make a few modifications to the process:

  1. I needed to launch Bluetooth Monitor (a manjaro utility, you may need to use an a utility appropriate to your distro). Inside Bluetooth Monitor, I paired the radio to the laptop. Click on the radio in the list of devices. Then, under the "Device" dropdown menu at the top, there should be a header labeled Connect To: and under that I clicked Serial Port. This then connected to the radio (I had to try this a few times before it successfully connected) and exposed the radio to the OS as /dev/rfcomm0
  2. Installing ax25libs and ax25-tools worked successfully using yay per TheModernHam's directions.
  3. Installing ax25-apps did not succeed using yay.
    1. I needed to use wget to download the source. I found the package on AUR
    2. Under the sources header is the link.
    3. I wget-ed the link:
      • e.g. wget https://linux-ax25.in-berlin.de/pub/ax25-apps/ax25-apps-0.0.8-rc5.tar.xz.
    4. Unpack the archive file using tar
      • e.g. tar -xf ax25-apps-0.0.8-rc5.tar.xz
    5. Move into the directory
      • e.g. cd ax25-apps-0.0.8-rc5
    6. A user on the AUR page suggested one fix for the package build:
      • Run sed -i -e "8i #include <stdlib.h>" ax25ipd/routing.c
      • This resolves a routing.c:83:13: error: implicit declaration of function ‘malloc’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration] error that would otherwise occur..
    7. Next we'll need to resolve an issue with the call app which uses the wrong import statemnt to import the ncurses library.
      • Run sed -i 's/ncursesw\/ncurses.h/ncurses.h/' call/call.c
      • From what i could find this change is required becaus Arch Linux (which manjaro is based on) doesn't package development libraries separately from apps so the import that is required is a little different from other distros like Ubuntu/Debian.
    8. We should be good to begin the build and install process:
      • ./configure
      • make
      • sudo make install
    9. One last problem I found, that i was able to work around, is that the yay installed libraries are trying to look at /etc/ax25 for configs, however the manually built library is trying to look at /usr/local/etc/ax25. To work around this, i just made a symbolic link from /etc/ax25 -> /usr/local/etc/ax25 so both locations will contain the same files.
      • Run ln -s /etc/ax25 /usr/local/etc/ax25

Now you should be able to continue with the guide from TheModernHam with the kissattach command. For me this took the form of:

sudo kissattach -l /dev/rfcomm0 ax0

Also, specific to my radio, for the step where you edit /etc/ax25/axports instead of 19200 I put 1200 which is the baud rate of the radio.

From there, i was able to run the call command to issue ax25 commands via the radio to connect to a remote node:

sudo call ax0 <call of the remote station>

From my observation, using ax25 for linux was much more stable than using QtTermTCP via Windows, and WOAD (Windows on Android) in terminal mode. By this I mean that I was able to connect to a remote node and leave a much longer meassage than the other two apps were able to support without disconnects. The radio placement when using all 3 apps was roughly the same +/-6 inches, and on different days. So not perfectly scientific but reasonably believable.

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