AMRAD Linux CD

[Maitland Bottoms]

Frank Gentges writes:
 > Many hams have indicated to me that they tried Linux of one sort or 
 > another and have not taken to using it as their main operating system.

I heard about this "Linux for HAMs" project:

"""
From: bruce at pixar.com (Bruce Perens)
To:   tcp-group at UCSD.EDU
dated: Feb 26 '95, 05:28

I have created a WWW page for my project of creating a "Linux for Hams"
distribution. Please add this anchor to your Amateur Radio WEB pages:

[ Non-current URLs removed. -AA4HS ]

The good news is that work to build a turn-key Linux system for Radio
Amateurs is coming along well. The bad news is that it's going to take
another month to get to Alpha-test.

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens
"""
More background at
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-detailed.en.html#s4.2

In the past 11.5 years things have become much, much better.

 > The disk would include a lot of software, information and material on 
 > all the stuff we are seeing on SDR, SoftRock, PSK-31 etc that run under 
 > Linux.  As new releases or programs come out it should make it easy to 
 > download and install.  Maybe AMRAD should take these releases and 
 > repackage them with some installation package to simplify installation 
 > and getting them running.  I can recall spending a lot of time trying to 
 > figure out the command line needed  to decompress and update a program 
 > once it is downloaded.

You are not the first person to think along these lines, here's a nice
document outlining the way to proceed:

http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/
http://wiki.debian.org/CustomDebian

 > Does the AMRAD web site have the facilities and bandwidth to support 
 > distribution of the CD image(s) or do we need to look for something 
 > different?

No, but if it is useful and freely distributable someone will
host a seed for BitTorrent.

 > AMRAD LINUX CD...Should be Not Just Another Linux Distribution.

Yes, we could get YDP involved and base it off of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

 > Oh yes,  what does the AFU stand for in AFU-Knoppix.  Somehow my mind is 
 > stuck on only one set of words.

Well, the 'F' stands for 'Radio'. That much is obvious :)

-Maitland