I’ve had better luck using ALSA than any of the other overlays. You have the choice of ALSA, OSS, Pulseaudio, Jack, and sometimes it seems they all fight it out for supremacy. Sound is always a pain to configure on linux. I could use the CAT serial interface for PTT but using VOX ensures the signal is present before TX. I set levels with sudo alsamixer and F6 to pick the right card, and then sudo alsactl store. Life is too short to fiddle about with trying to use the onboard audio out and try and stop any sounds going out, and I used the raw alsa interface, which is at the bottom of the WSJTX audio settings scroll, invisible at first. That has an internal vox detecting the signal to key transmit. I used a ZLP USB audio interface for the sound card rather than the onboard sound. The Alsa config sticks across a reboot, which is nice, and not always a given on linux in my experience. Once I had switched to using alsa this worked OK after lining up the transmit level and mic gain, I contacted YO22WARD in Romania on 17m and a station in Sardinia on 30m. Running WSJT-X this machine running wsjt-x on Xubuntu With about 19Gb free hard disk, rather than < 1Gb, at the end of its Windows service life. The trackpad works OK, the one thing I couldn’t get working was the camera, which I don’t find a huge disadvantage, and it was pretty dire when it did work.Įnd result – one serviceable and lightweight linux computer. It seems to lack a bit of sensitivity compared to the windows drivers, but it’s perfectly serviceable within the house. The install went OK, and the wifi card came up. It was either going to run Linux or head for the bin. I selected to install on the entire hard disk and blow away the old Windows install, because this machine is never going to run Windows again, because it can’t. This time simply select F9 Boot device options and boot off the USB stick, and from then on it was a regular, though non-internet-connected (because of the oddball WiFi card) Xubuntu install. Once you have done that, save and reboot, again pressing esc on startup. If I don’t do that my Xubuntu installer can’t see the hard disk. You want to enable Legacy boot, and disable secure boot. Under system config select boot options which takes you here Press esc repeatedly during boot, and then when it offers you the option go into F10 BIOS setup. It’s not that obvious to me what advantage UEFI gives me with a machine with a whopping 32Gb of disk space which is far from the 2Tb limit UEFI is supposed to fix, so legacy is fine with me.Ī disadvantage of linux on a laptop, apart from the general gangly geeky oddballness of linux on the desktop as opposed to on the server is battery life is not optimised so well. But first I had to switch off the UEFI BIOS. Which is indeed great, and took me from there. If you don’t already know how to install Xubuntu, then please read this great tutorial, which applies as much to Xubuntu as to Ubuntu. I found the install instructions for Xubuntu hard to find and sketchy, but they are good enough to feature this hint I uses Xubuntu LTS 20.04, downloading the iso and putting this onto a USB stick using balenaEtcher. It was surprisingly easy to load once I quit trying to install on the UEFI BIOS. The Ubuntu drivers seem to have fixed that now However, I had heard bad things about trying Linux on the HP stream, because the Wifi card is very proprietary. I had already run the FLdigi and WSJT-X software on the HP Stream in Windows so I knew it was capable of decent performance, better than the Pi4 which struggles a bit to decode WSJT-X in a reasonable time. It’s bad enough connecting the computer to the radio via analogue audio connectors 1, having to connect the Pi plus screen to a Bluetooth keyboard plus some sort of battery to USB-C power contraption gets a bit much in the field although it all works fine on the bench. I had been tinkering with a Raspberry Pi4 for amateur radio field use, but wrangling a Pi in the field for things like SOTA is a mess, because a Pi plus all the odds and sods you need to make it work is a collection of parts flying in loose formation, and unlike a DC3 they don’t always work well together. I did like the light weight and silent operation, but the overall gutless performance and slower and slower startup was bad. It’s a shame, because it’s otherwise serviceable, but totally non-upgradeable – the ‘hard drive’ is an eMMC soldered to the board. Pretty soon I had to use an outboard hard drive to be able to update windows, and by about 2019 even that didn’t work. And it had Windows 10, and 32Gb is only just enough to get Windows on. It was a bad move from the get-go, because the hard disk is only 32Gb.
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