Linux / Astronomy - 10/14/2025

Welcome to the Absolute TechNet podcast. This net aired on October 14th, 2025. Roy, KI7PKL, led a discussion about Linux and astronomy. For more information about the Absolute TechNet, visit our website at absolutetech.org. One of the things you'll find there is a donate button. We thank you in advance if you decide to help us with our costs. Thank you for listening and 73.

So for those on AllStar who missed the beginning of the net, we're talking about two, count them, two new ways to run Windows software under Linux. And, you know, for all those things that just don't work underwide. And there are a few, and sometimes they're important, too. Maybe you bought a new radio and you need the programming software to run under. But, you know, yeah, well.

You can do that. All right, Windboat. And I just put a link up in the AIM window to the articles that I used when I first installed Windboat yesterday. There are a few prerequisites that you need for this to run. And first of all, your computer probably comes with a Windows license. That doesn't mean it's licensed for Windows 11 necessarily. You know, the older the computer, the older Windows it's licensed for. But your computer probably comes with a Windows license.

And there's probably some kind of little sticker on the bottom that tells you about that. At least that's how it traditionally used to work. I think they've changed some of that now. And so the question of legality comes up. As far as I know, I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for anything, but at least according to one of these articles that I read, supposedly it's legal to do this. I believe it is.

But like I said, I'm not a lawyer. So, you know, just all these little disclaimers that we have to make here. So, anyway, for Windboat, I'm going to pause again.

Windboat can run a number of different ways. I just downloaded the app image. I love app images. They're really simple. You just download the app image. You make it executable. run it, click on it, or run it. I usually run it from the command line. You can click and just double click on it in the file manager. And very slick way to run install applications.

So this has an app image. It has, I think, a couple of other messages, too. I think it has a flat pack. I'm not sure. Is there a snap? I can't remember. I don't use snap. Then you... Then you need to download the Windows ISO from Microsoft. And I downloaded Windows 10 in this case. And you just go to the Microsoft website, Google for the download windows, and you can download, yeah, windows with no problem. You must...

disable your VPN or it won't let you download it because they want to know who you are. You also need to install Docker. And Docker, for those who don't know, Docker is a thing that allows you to run apps in... Containers, and I won't go into the details, and I'm a little scared on some of them myself because I haven't played with Docker much in a while.

Basically, you have an environment for an application that's separate from everything else. And if it messes everything up, it only messes up its container in your whole system. So you can install Docker. I just installed it from the regular Linux repository. Then you also need to install this thing called Docker Compose V2. And in the article that I read on how to install it,

They gave me this complex method of installing it so you can always have the very latest code. I didn't do that. I just installed it from the repository and left it at that, and it worked. And I said sudo app install. Docker.io. I had a little trouble finding the package name, and then I found it in my notes from a few years ago. Docker.io. And that's not at all intuitive. I pause.

Then you install Docker Compose V2, and I did the same thing. I just did it out of the repository. It works just fine. Then you need to add your user to the Docker group. And that's just a simple command to do that. And that's in the, as you say, sudo add user, your user name, and Docker. Then I installed a flat pack for something called FreeRDP. And FreeRDP is a very cool remote desktop app. And I've used it with another astronomy app.

And it works extremely well for this, too. And what you do is it's running on the system that it's running on. In this case, it will be this virtual Windows machine. And you can access it through your web browser. And you just point to, like, localhost or, you know, the address of host that's running it if it's on another machine. And it's port 806.

And it just works. And you can go full screen, and you've got a full screen desktop of a remote computer running from a web browser. Very cool stuff. Then there are a couple IP cables rules that you need to do. You just cut and paste those in.

And once you've got everything ready, then, okay, you run the app image. I'm going to pause again. You run the app image. And it will go through its own installation process. It will check to see if you have all the required dependencies, all the things I just talked about. and if they're there, it'll give you a nice, beautiful, green checkmark. If they're not there, they're not right, it'll give you that dreaded red X, but...

Over on the right, there's a little help button, and it will actually tell you how to install that or how to do that. So very, very cool, very intuitive system. And the only thing I say about that, though, is that... And when I first ran it, I didn't have all the stuff yet. And after I did have all the stuff, I had to close it and restart the app image for it to scan and see what was available.

So it doesn't update itself as you do it. So the next time I ran it, it had all the things installed, and it was able to be good to go. So at that point... I think there's a button that just starts the whole installation process, and it will ask you where your ISO that you downloaded is, you know, from Microsoft is.

churns and churns for a while, installs Windows in that Docker container, and when it's all done, you have a local account. It's not, I presume you could go back and do a Microsoft account if you wanted to, but it's just... the local account, and puts you right into the Windows desktop. And from there, you can do all the Windows stuff. You've got control panels and, you know, all your favorite Windows apps that you remember from days of you. Yep, they're all still there.

Then you can also, there's also a shared folder that you can get to from your Linux system. Or you can just go out in Edge. You could go out and just download the apps for Windows that way, too. And I've done it both ways. I pause. Anyway, I'm very happy to say that everything worked. I installed Echolink, which is one of the first things I installed when I'm doing something like wine or some kind of Windows emulation. Echolink worked.

I, of course, the biggies for ham radio, a lot of ham radio operators, and the thing that's been a big one for me, being a Linux user and an Ares member, is that I was able to download and install WinLink Express. And I didn't go as far as doing a session on the radio because I'm having issues with these little digi rigs. I've got three of them, and none of them work right.

Maybe there's something I just haven't figured out here. But I did do a Telnet Winlink session, and it went out and connected to the server, and, you know, I sent messages back and forth to my Gmail account. Everything worked. And it looked like Vara was going to work, too. So anyway, I call that highly successful. And it's something that, you know, it's fairly easy to do.

Not a whole lot of command line stuff, a little bit, but not too much. And, you know, if you're looking for a way to run Windows apps without going all the way, well, you're going most of the way, but not all the way. This is a way to do it.

With that, I'm going to close that one off. We have another message that I tried also today. Now that we have All-Stars, do we have anybody to check in? Let's start with tech comments. Please come back. We should call twice. All right, we have KG6. KG6PRM with a comment. KG6PRM. Larry, we'll send it over to you. The mic is yours. KG6PRM. Larry in San Diego.

Well, you know, you don't need to use Windows for everything. For example, if you want to use Echo Link, there's a program QTAL. It's a Linux program. Go ahead and install that. And, you know, then you're good to go. There's dbSwitch that you can install in Linux, and then you're good on it. You can install DroidStar. I think it's a flat pack, so it's pretty simple. And, you know, then you're good on your digital.

Those three things, if you're a Linux user, will help you along. As far as Windows goes, yeah, I had to install some kind of Windows because the... The code plug software I have for my HT, it runs under Wine. The only thing I can't do is upload and download to the radio. So back when I got that radio. I went to the Windows Download Center, and I downloaded the Windows ISO. Now, you've got to be connected up to the Internet when you do this. You install it from the ISO, you know.

Well, I installed it in VirtualBox under Linux. And if you have a Microsoft account, you know, if you don't create one, you have a Microsoft account. When you're installing it, it's going to ask you for your Microsoft account information. You put that in, and you're good to go. So I did that with Windows 10. For Windows 11, at some point just for fun, I...

downloaded this thing called Tiny Windows 11. It's an ISO. And I installed that under VirtualBox. And, you know, after I was convinced everything was working good, I got rid of the Windows 10. Anyways, just some suggestions there. I've been using Linux since, well, since Windows XP is when I made the switch somewhere around, I don't know, the early 2000s.

And I love it. I highly recommend it. If you haven't tried it, download, you know, I use Linux Mint. You can put it on a flash drive. You can boot off the flash drive, and you can test it out, make sure it works on your system. And if you like it, go ahead and install it. Back to the control. Oh, very cool. You said a couple of things. Let's start with that one.

Windows 11, is this like a Windows Lite, or what is that? Back to you. It's a Windows ISO image that somebody made, and they stripped out all the crap. Windows is huge. There's tons of bloat in there. And I don't care about all that stuff. I don't know what they stripped out. It's just I know it's smaller. I don't care about office or any other nonsense.

I just wanted a basic Windows that would run my, you know, code plug software. And then I had some circuit board software that only runs under Windows. I run that. I don't know if it would run under Wine or not. That's how I run it and that's it. I you know, I go in to Use the windows and then I get out because I do everything in Linux

Like I say, it's just there, and that's great for people who just have, like, some proprietary software that only runs under Windows. It doesn't run under Wine. I got a lot of stuff that runs under Wine, and that, you know. or write myself, you know, works under wine. Anyways, so, yeah, VirtualBox, and you get a Windows image, install it, make sure you go to the Internet.

and have a Microsoft account, and you should be good to go. Well, that sounds cool. Yeah, and Windows, sorry. Yeah, I am a bigot, but... I think most people would probably agree that Windows is kind of bloated. So, yeah, nice to have a slimmed down version. That sounds like an excellent idea. And, yeah, some of us don't have Microsoft accounts and don't really plan to. So, yes, but if you do, that does simplify things. And, yeah, you certainly could...

You could run Windows in a virtual machine, and I've done that too. Let me ask you something else. Before I let you go, though, Droidstar. Now, I looked into that, I think it was a couple of years ago, and at the time, I believe that was Droidstar, I think it was anyway, that they had some issues with... intellectual property or something, and you couldn't do GMR. Is that fixed? Can you do GMR with Droidstar now? Back to you. Yes, you can.

You know, I have DroidStar. I'm on my tablet right now, and I'm running Echo Link on my Android tablet. But I also have DroidStar on here. And, yeah, it's the vocoder that, you know, that was what was proprietary. It used to be built into Droidstar, and then the author had to strip it out because of licensing, you know, whatever. So now, like if you install DroidStar on your phone, your Android phone, or your tablet, you have to manually install the vocoder.

You go to, in the settings, you put in this address. It's widely available if you search for it on the, you know, on the Internet. Pizza, something, I forget what it is off the top of my head. You put that in there, and then it installs a software vocoder, and you're good to go. I can't 100% remember, but the Droidstar is a flat pack.

I think, although I could be wrong here, but I think the vocoder was already installed. Because, you know, when you get a flat pack, it's like already pre-configured and everything. It's just, you know, it's just like one big thing, and it all comes down. It doesn't affect anything else on your system. So I think the vocoder was already installed, but it definitely works because I use it on my computer all the time.

If you have to install the vocoder, like I say, there's plenty of websites that tell you how to do it. Back to net control. OK. That makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like the issue was a redistribution issue. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, back whenever this was, I think it was two summers ago now, I actually went as far as to sign up for TGIF, and I'm pretty certain I have a TGIF number, and I'm registered, so I need to give this a try. Yeah, that might be my next little...

My next little adventure. Get on DMR finally after all this time. Hey, thank you so much.

Information. I know I certainly found it very useful, and I suspect some other folks found it very useful as well. So... With that here, let's see if we have any more check-ins. Do we have anybody else that would like to check in with Tech Comm? Let's just please come out. Whiskey, five, Michael, Mike. Antoinette recognizes Whiskey 5. Mike, Gulf, Mike. Very cool call. Fred, the mic is yours. Have I tried it yet? Anytone 878s. Our little program, the TYT 380, MD 380, and 390.

So it sounds like QGMR is kind of like a shirt for GMR. And you know what? I'm not sure how many radios there are that even do GMR. Partly that's why I'm looking at Droidstar with a lot of interest because we had the convention out here last summer, and there was a radio, and I don't remember what it was. It was some Japanese radio that they recommended. They said everybody uses, it was like 285 bucks. So just, yeah, what radio would you recommend for DMR?

Yeah, what radio would you recommend? Back to you. And does that program support like most of the GMR radios or just a few of them? I have all three of those. They're all HTs. But here's the kicker. I don't jack with DMR, really. I kind of got fed up. program with that program are the three I mentioned. And there's several more on there. So, I mean, you just have to, you know, I'm sure you can find something if you search QDMR for Linux.

I may find out some more and give me some more information next week on it. Like I said, I'm sitting out here with a water hose right now, so I'm not too much good with trying to figure out. things out, I got to get my yard watered. I hear that. Here in my neighborhood, most of us don't even water our lawns anymore. Very sad, too. When I first moved here, I had landscapers come everywhere. Now, yeah, and now, boy, how things have changed.

Hey, you must live in a little more upscale neighborhood than the one I live in if you water your yard. Anyway, thank you for all of that. Seriously, very useful information. And, yeah, I know there have been some issues on some of the DMR networks and so forth. But, anyway, yeah, I know a lot of people don't like the sound of the audio either. I don't know. I'm an old single sideband guy. Hey, it could be worse. Anyhow, Fred, thank you so much for some excellent information here.

And let's see, over here in the chat window here, we've got VE3FBX. Here is a link to QGMR GitHub.

List the radio support. Okay, very cool. And that's probably where you can get it, too. So anybody's interested in that, that's the place to go. All right, well, let's see if we have any more, anybody else to check in. This is KI7PKL, Roy in Portland. Got another comment for you real quick. W5MGM. Hey, go ahead, Fred. also installed it when I...

Very cool. Yeah. And, of course, I'm a command line guy. Kind of cut my teeth on, you know, sitting behind an IBM 3270 green screen terminal back in the day. But, yeah, that software manager actually does work pretty well. You can search for things.

Well, okay, like I mentioned earlier, I had trouble finding the package name for Docker. If I looked for it in there, I probably would have gone right to it. I don't know why I didn't try that. But that probably would have saved me a little time and trouble. So... With that, let's see if we have any more check-ins. KI7PKL, Roy in Portland with the Absolute TechNet. Looking for check-ins? Please come back with your call twice, slowly, phonetically, and whether or not you have tech comments.

Well, all right then. Let's see here. We'll move on to the next one. And after, no, I did this windboat thing yesterday. In fact, I think it was last night. Actually, I guess it was yesterday afternoon. Then last night, on our local TechNet, Learned about another thing here where you can run Windows 11 in Docker. And we can run Windows 11 in Winboat, too. You can run Windows 11 in Docker by another slightly different method.

Only slightly. In fact, it's so similar that I thought when he was talking about it on the TechNet last night, I thought he was talking about Windboat. And it turns out he wasn't. This one, once you've, and I did this one today too on my machine that's licensed for Windows 11, and basically I went through the same procedure I talked about with Windboat. I installed Docker Compose, I installed Docker, I installed FreeRGP, and...

Here's the firewall rules that I did for the other one because I'm probably going to need those. Not sure, but probably. And oddly... I didn't install an app or anything like I did with Windboat. I did this all from within Docker. And there's a very long, oh, here, I know what I didn't do here. I didn't put some links up, did I? Put some links up. There we go. Hold on. There we go. Now I need to pause for a moment. There we go.

So something I probably could have mentioned when I was talking about WinBoat, any time you do virtualization, you need to make sure that virtualization is enabled in your BIOS. And not all biases are the same. I can't give you specific instructions on how to get there, but it's in there someplace. Also, when you do it by this method, it is unactivated, although I'm assuming you could probably activate it once it's installed, but I don't know Windows that well.

And you run this one very long command, and it's a Docker command, and it has all sorts of information in here. like what port that FreeRDP will use. Here we use 8006, which is the default. You can also pick... different versions of Windows. I did Windows 11, but you can do Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows XP was on the list, also some versions of Windows Server.

And amazingly, and kind of by magic, Docker will go out there and download the ISO. I don't even know where it put it. Somewhere on this computer. If you have all that other stuff going, you know, Docker, Compose, and whatnot, it will just happen. And if you go into your web browser and watch, you know, local host port 806,

You will actually see it installing Windows as it's installing, and it just happens. You don't do anything. You just watch it happen, and eventually it finishes up, and you're looking at... Windows desktop, just like we were with Winboat. And it's a local account. It's not signed into Windows or anything, but some of us don't like to do that. So that's an advantage here.

So, anyway, it works. It runs, you know, all the stuff that we can run on Windows 10. Just seems very straightforward. So, anyhow. Two methods, very similar, but slight advantages and disadvantages either way. Oh, yes, with Windboat, you automatically have it mapped. to a folder on your host system that you can share files. With this one, you have to do a little bit more to set that up. So anyway, I'm kind of excited about this.

Because there are some things that I just simply don't work under wine. One of them is some very popular astronomy software that people use to control their observatories and telescopes and all that, cameras and stuff with. And I've never tried it. So, hey, one of these, I don't know that I'm going to want to switch to it. I'm pretty happy with the software I use that runs under Linux, but at least now I can try this one that...

90% of the people in the astronomy world use because most of them use Windows. So anyway, kind of cool stuff. So if you're, anyway, I highly recommend you ever need to try. It just seems to work pretty well. I pause.

All right, let's see if we have anybody to check in or any comments, questions, or anything of that nature. Kilo Zero. All right, we have K0 Bravo Echo Tango with a comment. And we've got KM5Y with a comment. K0 B-E-T Adam, the mic is... Alright, this looks interesting. I don't think I've heard of this before. And this is one of those times I wish I could read really super fast.

Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open source environment you can trust. That's the mission of React OS. Well, very interesting. So maybe we've got a third one here. And there's a big green button that says Download ReactOS 0.4.15. So... Yeah. All right. I'll throw that out to the net. Has anybody else heard of this and tried it? The React OS. Please come now. KG6PRM.

I think I got your call wrong. I don't think her name is Linda. Is that KG6 Delta Romeo Mike? Kilo Golf 6 Papa Romeo Mike. I was talking earlier. This is Larry in San Diego. Okay, yes. Go ahead. Well, I've never installed React OS. Every once in a while, they come out with a new version, and in the comments, People are just blasting it. It's so crappy, so incomplete, so unstable. I mean, it's fine if you just want to see kind of what they did.

But you really don't want to use it. It's so far behind. You know, we discussed earlier, you know, other solutions, and you're probably better off to go with the other solutions. Yeah, it would be nice if ReactOS, you know. lived up to the promise. But, you know, from everything I've read, best to avoid it. Okay. I sure hear that. I sure hear that.

And, of course, now, don't anybody get the wrong impression. That doesn't mean it's always going to be, you know, like that. I remember years ago, whining, okay, it can run notepad, but... It couldn't run much better. Much beyond notepad, it just couldn't get much done. And now we're running Winlink Express on it. So, yeah, give these guys a few years. They may make that into something very cool. But, yeah, word to the wise. Let's see. We're on.

Version 0.4. So, yeah, there might be a ways to go with that. So, Larry, thank you so much for that. That bit of information. So, okay, we got two new ways, maybe 2.1 new ways. How about that? Okay, let's see. Let's go back to Craig, K0BIT. Do you have any further comments? Hey, fine business. Yeah, and that stuff's good to know. But, you know, like I said, keep an eye on these things that are immature because sometimes quite often they grow up.

And in a few years, it might be big and bad. You just never know. Bad in a good way. All right. Well, hey, Craig and Larry, thank you both for that useful information. All right, let's go over to KM. By the way, this is KI7PKL, just to say that. Let's go over to KM5Y. The mic is yours. KI7PKL, KM5Y. Hey, Roy. Cool. Thank you, Mike. And, yeah, they keep making it better all the time, too. So things that don't work now, next year they might work. All right. Well, let's do another thing here, then.

There's the link right here. I'll post that in. Judy's Nets, you know, it's like you're your own producer, you know. You've got to answer the phone and do everything else, too. Okay, there's a link coming up in the chat window here momentarily. All right, well, you remember that I think it was Leatherman used to do stupid pet tricks. Well, here we've got something kind of like that.

It's seven useful things you didn't know you can do in your Linux terminal. I don't know if we'll go into all of them, but anyway, I put a link to the article in the AIM window. And the first stupid command line terminal trick is generate a random number. And if you ever need a random number, there's a way to do that. And basically there's a... variable and you already have you don't have to install anything to do this you type echo in the space and then

the name of the variable random, which is all uppercase dollar sign r-a-n-d-o-m. So if you type echo space uppercase dollar r-a-n-d-o-m, it will generate a random number. And then you can do some other things too, like, and I won't try to go into the full syntax here because that's kind of awkward, but it's right here in the examples I'm looking at in the article.

You can also generate a random number between 1 and whatever. And you can change the number. So in the example, they did 1 to 100. And sure enough, that worked. And I hit it a bunch of times, and each time it came up with a different number, which was cool. Then there was a thing, I'm not sure why you'd want to do this, but you can also generate multiple random numbers and shuffle them. In the example, they said shuffle...

numbers between one and a thousand and five of them, and yeah, it did that. Pause. Then there's also another one here, and again, I'm really not going to repeat the syntax for this one. I just want to copy and paste it, trust me. But if you look at it closely, you see things you might be able to want to change, too. You can also generate random letters and numbers, as in like a password.

This is another one that you don't install, I think, right? Yeah, no, you don't install this one. It uses things that you already have on your system and you can generate a... A random password with you can specify how long you want it to be. And that one was kind of cool, too. I may actually start using that one. I generate them myself, but...

Yeah, you know, they're probably more random if you use a random generator than coming up with them yourself. I pause. Then they get into some things that are a little more interesting here. And there's an app called translate-shell. That's the name of the package. And I just said pseudo-app because I'm running a Debian-based system. Pseudo-app, if you're running Fedora, of course, it's different. And then the command that you use to run it is just trans. And then you give it a code.

for which language. And in the example, they have a colon and then ES, which will translate whatever text follows that into Spanish. Why is it E-S? Ah, because E-S is short for Espanol. It took me a little while to figure that one out. Because I was trying to figure out, what if I wanted to use German? And all those things I tried didn't work. I paused. So if you, and it turns out if you wanted to translate something into German, you'd say trans colon D-E as in Deutsche.

And there are other languages that are supported. I haven't found the codes for them all yet. And you can also do it, of course, with you can translate a whole file and a few other. Little neat things like you can specify the input language and the output language, although it seems to kind of figure that one out on its own. Let's see here. You can also generate QR codes from the terminal and have them display on your terminal screen. And the package for this one is called...

Q-R-E-N-C-O-D-E. Q-R encode. And when you run that one, you give it like a... For example, I gave it like a web URL, and it generated a web URL. You can also pipe that, of course, you can also pipe that out to an image so that you could, you know, send that image to somebody or you could print it.

You can put it on the sign on the door, like some places I've been, they have QR codes, and you just scan them with your phone, and it sends you the valuable information they want you to see, or gives you malware. You've got to be careful with QR codes I pause. So what else have we got here? Let's see. Number four, convert files to any format from the terminal. And there are a couple of tools here, and these are very cool. One of them is called Pandoc. And you can use Pandoc just to...

You know, say you have a word processor file in one format and you want to convert it to another format, Pandoc can do that. For images... There's, where's the name of it here? Image Magic. I'm looking for, where did I have the install for that? It's here somewhere. Anyway, ImageMagick can convert something like a JPEG. to a PNG, for example, or some other formats. There are quite a few image formats. And sometimes it can be kind of handy to have something that converts.

You can also do that in like GIMP or, you know, Photoshop or something like that. Oh, and this utility can also resize the image too, which is kind of handy. Pause.

Then there's one that I've heard a lot about from one of my local friends here because he does a lot of audio stuff, FFMPEG. And FFmpeg is very versatile for converting video formats, extracting audio from video. It says here, even creating GIFs. I'm assuming those are animated GIFs. I haven't played with that in a long time. So anyway. That's a very useful tool if you want to convert video formats. I pause.

I think I heard something in there, but whatever it was was very broken up. So did somebody have a comment or trying to check in or something? Okay, not sure what happened here. Okay, this one I was kind of glad to find. Something I used to use many years ago and I'd forgotten, and I couldn't really quite remember how it worked. And I thought it was part of Cron, and it's not. It's actually a separate app.

And so if you install at, as in AT, and then once you install it, there's a service. You enable the service ATD. as in Alpha, Tango, Delta. And, of course, they add the D because it's a daemon, which is what we call services in Linux. Not daemon, like I cast you out, but daemon, D-A-E-M-O-N. Years ago, my mom had a real problem with being called demons. But you can...

You can put in a command, and then you can pipe it to at, you know, with the vertical bar. You can pipe it to at, and you could say, like, well, in the example in front of me here, they... wanted to give themselves a reminder. So they said echo, and then they put in, you know, whatever the old reminder was in quotes, the vertical bar, and then at now plus five minutes.

That's the neat thing about that. And it would come up in five minutes or whatever and give them that reminder. I used to use this a long time ago when I was learning to do IP. Some kind of firewall rules. It was either IP cables. IP change was before that. And I can't remember what it was before IP change. But anyway, one of those three back in the day when I lived in a completely different place.

I was playing with firewall rules, and I was on a machine that I was not logged on to. I was working on a headless server, and I needed a safe way, you know, if I messed up. to be able to get back into it without having to go find a, you know, that was a long time ago, without having to get a big, heavy CRT terminal on the keyboard and hook them up. So anyway, I set up an at command.

To reset the firewall in, you know, I don't know, two minutes or something like that. So if what I tried didn't work, just chill for a couple of minutes and it would all fix itself. That was very, very useful, and it saved me a lot of grief. I paused. Okay, this next one is about viewing markdown files in the terminal, and that's something I know very little about, so I'm not even going to get into that one because I haven't done that.

There's another one. The last one is called A-S-C-I-N-E-M-A. I'm not sure how I would pronounce that. But it's supposed to allow you to share a... terminal in a web browser session. I wasn't very successful with that one. I could start it with some thing running. In my case, I tried HTOP, which is a monitor that allows you to track how busy your system is, how much memory you're using, how busy the CPUs are, and all that kind of stuff. It's a very useful tool.

Not the one I used today, but it was the one they showed in the example. And that did work. I started it with H-top, and I could see the H-top running in the terminal. But when I tried to start just a regular bass shell session, and interact with it and see that in the terminal, I couldn't figure out how to get that to work. So there's probably a way to do it. I just haven't figured it out yet. All right. Anyway, I hope that...

Of some interest. Hopefully out of all those seven of those, hopefully something sparks somebody's interest in there. So with that, we'll see. Do we have any comments or questions on any of that? Please come down. Kilo Golf 6. How about Romeo Mike? KG6 PRM. Go ahead, Larry. Yeah, this is Larry in San Diego. And... You've mentioned about doing conversions and graphics. You know, many, many, many years ago when I used to use those, I used a program called IrfanView, I-R-F-A-N.

V-I-E-W. And it's a free program. And I liked it so much, I'm still using it. It runs under wine, free. It's great for... You know, my needs are simple. I a lot of times just want to crop something. I want to resize it. I may want to flip it from left to right. It does all that stuff. You know, it's not like for some power user.

It's, like, real heavy into that stuff. But it does all the simple tasks that, you know, most people would want to do. Highly recommend it. Like I say, it runs under Linux. So... And it's freely available out there on the Internet. I-R-F-A-N-V-I-E-W. Hey, very cool. Very cool. Might have to download that later and give that a try myself.

Thank you for that. Any questions or comments on that, please, for now. Please check in. Kilo, November 4, Echo Whiskey Tango. I'm just sitting back listening in between deliveries. And the net recognizes KN4EWT. Thank you for checking in. And, okay, well, let's do another one of these then. I think I have a couple more. I have one more.

And we might end a little early today. We only have, usually we got like 50, 60, 70, 80 people. We have 19 people checked in today. So kind of a small net today. So. Let's see here. We'll talk about a little bit of astronomy, not a whole lot. There isn't that much going on right now, but there's always something going on. Planets right now, if you're looking up in the evening sky, you will see after sunset.

Mars is a very small planet, and it's very far away. It sets pretty early on after sunset. So it might be tough to spot because, like I said, it's a very small planet and it's darn near as far away as it gets. Not quite, but almost. And it is fading into the sun's glow. So it will come out. In fact, it will be so bad, usually it's difficult to communicate with probes that are on Mars, and some of them may even kind of...

Go into hibernation for a little bit until we get back around on the other side. Mercury is actually higher. Above the horizon than Mars. Mars is so low. So both of those are going to be tough to spot. Saturn, on the other hand, was at opposition on September 21st. And, of course, opposition means that it's... directly opposite the Sun, which means it's the closest point to Earth, as we're whizzing by at a much greater speed than Saturn moves. So...

That's in the evening. In the morning, say like 5.30 or something like that, you would see Venus. Fading into the sun's glow. And it's kind of heading the opposite way of Mars. Well, it's actually heading the same way. But anyway, it's too complicated. It's heading into the sun's glow. Let's put it that way. It will be an evening object.

before too long. Jupiter, on the other hand, is much higher up, and it will be in opposition in January. So we're getting pretty close, three months away. And, you know, if you're an astrophotographer like me, You might even want to take a snap, snap a picture or two of Jupiter starting pretty soon. So I haven't done that yet, but hopefully we'll get to that at some point in the fairly near future. I apologize.

A whole lot of events going on this month. About the most exciting one I could find here was on October 19th, Venus and the very thin crescent moon will be very close together. Two objects to rule the morning here. Venus is pretty bright. It's just brighter than anything else in the sky except for the moon. The moon is brighter than Venus. Okay, that's about all we got. Oh, yeah, there's one more here. There's a meteor shower coming up as well in October. Pause. The Orinoid meteor shower.

And why do we name meteor showers after constellations? Well, there's a reason for that. The meteors are kind of coming all from the same direction. And from our vantage point... The meteors usually, well, always, the meteors appear to be coming from some point in the sky. And so we named them after whatever constellation they appear to be coming from. No, the meteors aren't coming from Orion. They're just coming from the direction of Orion. So, let's see. By the way, this...

Oh, this is from Earth Sky as well here. Let me quickly go over here and put the link in here. There we go. Okay, watch for the orinoid meteors on the morning of October 21st, starting after midnight through the wee hours before dawn. If you trace Orion meteors backward on the sky's dome, they seem to radiate from the upraised club of the famous constellation Orion the Hunter. This is the shower's radian point.

The bright star near the radiant point is reddish Betelgeuse. Oh, you probably heard of that one, even if you're not an amateur astronomer. Under a dark sky with no moon, the Uranus exhibit a maximum of about... 10 to 20 meteors per hour. And, yeah, they have a nice little chart in here that they prepared that shows you right where they appear to be coming from.

And, of course, these kind of things generally happen in the wee hours of the morning. We had one here a while back that was very, very different. It was an evening directly overhead meteor shower. I didn't even know they had those. Urinoids are more typical of what we normally have. So, yeah, you've got to get up pretty early in the morning to see that.

All right, with that here, let's go back, see if we have anybody to check in. Any comments, questions, or anything, please come down. Okay, do we have any, we're going to shut this in just a little bit. We've got a real small number of people today, so... Yeah, I can't quite expect, I guess, when you only have 19 people. So do we have any, before we shut this thing down, do we have any further comments, questions, check-ins? topics, or anything else anyone would like to say, please come down.

Okay, can you give me that phonetically? I got the wrong name, so I'm sure I got a letter wrong. Now we got you, Alvin. Okay, thank you so much for checking in. Did you have a tech comment? Well, I just got here late, so what was the question that y'all was going over? Oh, okay, sorry about that. Oh, then you might not know. Anyway, the subject today has been, the main subject today has been running a new message of running Windows apps under Linux.

You know, people, some of us just don't run Windows, but we've got to run Windlink Express or something like that. And so there's going to be more and more ways of doing that. And traditionally, we've run things under wine. Not everything runs under wine. Lots of stuff does. And, you know, more and more things work all the time. Wine rocks. But still.

You know, there are times when you need to run something that doesn't run underwind. So there are a couple of things that actually install a copy of Windows, an unregistered one. You can have that running. It's kind of like a virtual machine on your Linux machine. And anyway, that's what we've been talking about today. Yeah, people loved Windows 7. I hate to admit it, I even like Windows 7 too. In fact, when Windows 7 was out, I bought this huge, very heavy 17-inch laptop. And...

I'll never do that again. I had to carry that stupid thing around. I had to buy a bigger backpack because it was so darn big. But it came with a little remote control that pops out of the side. It doesn't work anymore, but I don't even know if I can fix it or not, but it died a while back. But a little remote control that pops out of the side.

which worked really well with Windows Media Player. And I hooked up a TV dongle, watched TV with it, played all kinds of music and video and stuff like that. So, yeah, Windows 7 was great. And it's funny, you know, people loved Windows 7. People didn't seem to like Windows 8 that much. People didn't like Windows 10. People hate Windows 11.

So for those of us who hate Windows 11, but we have to run things, yeah, the things we were talking about today might be useful. All right. Let's just have one last call for check-ins before we shut down. Kilo, Yankee 4, November, Bravo, KY4NB, Scott in Memphis. Hi, everybody. I'm late to the party. 5RS. KY4NB, and...

Tell me if you do have a tech comment. I'm assuming because you just got here. Probably not. But if you do, we'd certainly like to hear it. And there was another station. I didn't quite get your call. Can you come again? Okay, Victor Alpha 7, Hotel Juliet Popper. Kevin, Charles, does either one of you have a comment or are you just listening? KY4NB here, Scott. No tech comment. I just wanted to get in and get on the list and listen for a minute. I just realized I need to...

Need to pull up this net. I got the email earlier in the week. KY4NB, back to net. Okay, very, very cool. Yep, this is a net that I quite often... Just, you know, I get on it every week, and sometimes I even talk on it. Usually I don't, though. Unless, of course, it's like today when I'm in that control. But usually I just kick back and listen to what everybody else has to say. So, very cool. All right. So, Kevin, Charles, thank you both for checking in.

All right, well, hey, I think we've run out of gas here, and we've made it through an hour and a half, and I'm going to call that good. So just last call for check-ins, last comments or anything. Please come out. Okay, let's see. We've got VHJP way down in the noise. We'll come back to you in a second. And who was the other station? Oh, there we go. VE5RS. All right. Let's see here. Let's go back up here to VA7HJP. Did you have a comment or just checking in?

No, you're already checked in. Looks like you probably do have a comment. Yeah, I was just wondering, have you had any experience with hybrid transceivers? I have an old Kenwood. Oh. I assume you're talking about back in the days when they were solid state, except the finals and the driver were tubes. Am I right? Oh, okay. Okay, gotcha. And, uh, yeah, um, and I'm not sure what to really tell you here other than, uh, you know, if you've got everything tuned up and, um, hmm.

Oh, I know one thing you can do, if you have it on the air, you know, connected to one antenna and everything. What I would do, if I wasn't sure if I was getting out, I would go... to a Web SGR. And, you know, it's a software-defined radio that you can access on the web. And maybe somebody remembers the URL for that. I don't read it off the top of my head. But if you...

If you search for Ham Radio Web SGR, you'll probably go right to it. And they have these things all over the place. The one I, a lot of people out west seem to like is this one in northern Utah. You're a little farther away. No, you're not, actually. Yeah, you might like that one, too. And anyway, you can tune the WebSDR. You've got a receiver in another... Part of the world. And you can tune that to your transmitting frequency and transmit and see if you hear it yourself.

And, in fact, I've checked into, like, the noontime yet and things like that on HF and recorded them and listened to them later. That's kind of cool, too. Anyway, back to you. Okay, you faded into the noise again. At first you were super weak, then you kind of came up a bit, then you faded back again. So let's give that one more try, see if we can pull you out.

Very, very cool. That time you came through, okay? Yeah, I know how it is when you're walking. You kind of come and go. So thank you for checking in. And I am glad that we were able to pull you out of the noise. That's what ham radio is about.

All right, let's go over to VE5RS. Ron, sounds like you might have a comment, or were you just checking in? Okay, yeah, and I wondered if something like that would happen, and sure enough, it did. I didn't really hear it. I think I heard about this just recently, in fact, very recently. Well, okay. Two parts to that. One, yes, they have traditionally had extended support. Usually you had to pay for it.

And it wouldn't be too expensive the first year. They'd do it for five years, six, seven years maybe. It would get more expensive every year. This one, I believe the first year is free. Where did I hear that? Don't quote me on that, but I think that's what I heard someplace that the first year was free. Did you get the ears for free?

Okay, that's actually a little less than a year, so good to know. So, yeah, it sounds like you're getting 10 months out of it then. Bummer. I thought it was a full year. Well, it's something. Anyway. And, yeah, you know, that's been the big controversy with Windows 11. There could be a lot of e-waste starting very shortly. For Linux users, though, this is kind of a boon for Linux users because all of a sudden, computers that don't qualify for Windows 11...

are really, really, really, really on sale. I bought a couple Windows 10 computers this past winter, and they were already on sale, but they might be even more on sale now. But... I've got a couple of sync pads here. Those things will run for a long time. Actually, sitting here in front of me right now, there are two 13-year-old laptops. One of them belongs to a friend. I'm setting it up for him. And one of them is just mine. And I'm thinking of, you know...

Upgrading to something newer, but it's still working. I've got Netlogger's running on it and everything. And Linux will run on old computers better than Windows as well. A long time will progress before you get a Linux that won't run on your computer. Now, just now, some of the distributions are starting to not have 32-bit versions, and you have to have a 64-bit computer.

But 64-bit computers have been around a long time. So there you go. So anyway, VE5RS, I think I was talking to you. I'll send it back to you. Very cool. Well, thanks for that. Thanks for checking in and your comment. And now who has the comment? KG5HED. My comment is... Yep, you're right about that. I have the only computer that's running here. It's my friend's computer, and it has a built-in DVD drive, but it's the only one. And, yeah, they stopped putting drives in them a while back. Oh.

Ten years ago, maybe, or something like that. It's been a while. And, yeah, as far as I know, well, at least I have one. I have a USB DVD drive. It's a tiny little thing. It's slightly bigger than just a regular CD case. But it works great. And so, yeah, nowadays if you want CDs, you have to either have an old computer or one of those USB drives. So, you know, everything, you know, and actually when you think about it, it only holds, what, 4.4, 4.75 gigabytes or something like that. And...

If you have a flash drive, you might have a hard time finding one that small. You know, things have just gotten bigger than that. By the way, can you give me your call phonetically? Just so I get the log straight, it didn't come up. Okay, you were already checked in, too. Okay, now I got it. All right, thank you so much for that, Alvin. And so you are not Kathy. That's darn sure.

All right, we'll change the color there because you were actually on the net. You weren't just listening. Very cool. Alvin, thank you for that. Thank you for that. All right, well, hey, we're about 15 minutes to the top of the hour, so I'm going to go ahead and shut this thing down. I want to thank everybody who has joined us, and I hope that some of the information that was presented was useful to some people at least.

And can't tell you who's in net control next week, but I guarantee it'll be a good net. Because that's just the absolute tech net. Thanks to folks who were in the background. A special thanks to Jeanette for getting hold of the man behind the curtain and getting our all-star going again. I'm sure that... made a huge difference. So everybody have a great day, and we will talk to you down the log. This is KI7PKL signing clear.