Use of Airnav's software under Wine/Linux?

[Fenris]

Hi all

I'm in the market for a Radarbox and was wondering whether anyone here has been able to get the system and software running under Linux. While I have access to Windows machines running either XP or Vista, I'd be very pleased if I could run everything while running Linux which is my normal environment.

If anyone has any experience of doing this I'd be pleased to know, there is some evidence at WineHQ that the Airnav ACARS decoder works under Wine so I'm assuming that the Radarbox software does too, but I can't find anything explicit to say so.

Here's hoping!

[Fenris]

Well, after some investigation, I have not been able to get RB to work under Linux, at least in terms of actually connecting to the hardware, but I know why.

As a Windows application, RB needs to be run under Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator, a recursive acronym) and currently Wine does not support USB devices in any comprehensive manner, so until Wine can be made to see the USB endpoints by creating an interface to the Linux libusb libraries, it isn't going to work.

Someone has managed to get an SBS-1 to work under Linux, see http://oh7lzb.blogspot.com/2008/01/running-sbs-1-basestation-on-linux.html for details, but that's because BaseStation can be persuaded to connect to a network port rather than USB, I don't think RB can do this.

So, one day perhaps I can get this to work, but it seems not for the time being.

[AirNav Support]

Fenris,

Seems like you answered your own question :)

I don't think so far anybody has managed to get it to work under Linux. Before you ask we won't be looking to create something for Linux as the market for that is too small at the moment.

[Fenris]

Fenris,

Seems like you answered your own question :)

I don't think so far anybody has managed to get it to work under Linux. Before you ask we won't be looking to create something for Linux as the market for that is too small at the moment.

Yes, I thought it was worth making sure it was documented here for other people.

My laptop only runs Vista for two applications, RB and something I use for firmware updates and edits on various mobile phones. Naturally I'd like to avoid it altogether, but life is sometimes uncooperative ;-)

[jgomberg]

... I'm in the market for a Radarbox and was wondering whether anyone here has been able to get the system and software running under Linux...

I'm not sure how helpful this may be, but have you considered running RadarBox and software on a Windows virtual machine over Parallels for Linux?

I very recently installed a RadarBox and software on a Windows virtual machine over Parallels on a MacBook Pro running OS-X. OS-X runs over a BSD kernel which is very similar to Linux and I can attest that both hardware and software seem to be holding their own so far.

Parallels is available for Linux provided you are running kernel 2.6.23 or higher.

Another alternative would be to run a Windows virtual machine on VMWare installation for Linux.

I can appreciate that Wine gets you around the bloat of a full Windows & Parallels installation but in the absence of a Wine implementation this might be a possibility.