Keep VARA only option
5rm opened this issue · comments
As the .NET seems to cause problems, could you please concider keeping the version without it available. For many people your great script without WinlinkExpress is enough to run Vara on pi. Very soon there is Vara support in PAT which is a multiplatform replacement for WinlinkExpress.
73 Jouko oh5rm
Thank you for the kind words. I had seen the Pat forum announcement about the VARA support coming in the next update too. I let KM4ACK know yesterday about that just in case he wants to consider adding VARA HF/FM/Chat to BAP.
The current version of the Winelink script doesn't include .NET at the moment. I've replaced .NET with wine-mono instead. Wine-mono has its own set of bugs, but installs much quicker.
The difference in install time between [wine-mono + RMS + VARA HF/FM/Chat] vs [just VARA HF/FM/Chat] in the current script is maybe 5 minutes or so. I could implement the vara_only argument again, but I think it's a small different in installation time. I'm hoping to keep the complexity of the script low too in preparation of trying to implement more platforms (chrome, mac, other linux distros).
73 Eric KI7POL
Wine-mono ended up having some extra bugs we need to fix, & Seb fixed some .NET 4.6 stuff, so I'm moving back to .NET for now. I'll re-implement the vara_only option soon too!
Yes, good to hear that you are going to keep the VARA_only option for those who do not need WLE and to whom robustness is the first priority.
Eric,
I tried it again on a new SD with Bullseye, after two hours of looping had to break out with ctl-c.
It looks like it tries some .NET runtime optimization without end.
As many fellow hams would like to have VARA running on PI4, could you plese make a working script without the .net stuff which is causing problems.
I still have your earlier Vara only version running fine with vARIM and pilinbpq. That is what many people are asking, they do not need WinlinkExpress.
Btw, I found that the basic wine and box86 were still ok. I manually installed and configured the rest and managed to get vara and vArim to run. Had to add some dll’s to system32 and add vb6runtime etc.
The ever since Winlink moved to using .NET 4.6 (instead of 3.5sp1), the .NET installation has become a lot longer in the script. Apologies for the slow updates - the past month ended up being incredibly busy. I've just now re-implemented the vara_only option with 54b8957. I was able to test both regular and vara_only installations and both are still working on my end. Hope this helps the installation process in the future!
Just for information:
I yesterday installed also VARACHAT which uses COM instead of Linux /dev/ttyUSB0.
I had to use wine regedit to add an entry to the PORT COM1... /dev/ttyUSB0 to get the PTT work.
Just for information: I yesterday installed also VARACHAT which uses COM instead of Linux /dev/ttyUSB0. I had to use wine regedit to add an entry to the PORT COM1... /dev/ttyUSB0 to get the PTT work.
The re-implemented vara_only option will install VARA Chat too.
I haven't tried checking on COM port connections from the Pi yet, but I'll look at that later. Were you having any PTT issues with the Pi with Vara Chat and the latest script?
I did do some work with a Debian Linux VM and the COM port issue with wine-mono and learned the following things about checking COM port permissions:
- You can check to see which USB devices Wine has detected with
ls ~/.wine/dosdevices - If you then run
ls -l ~/.wine/dosdevices/com5(or any other com#), you should get some kind of output showing which hardware device is symlinked to that 'com#' (in my case on Debian x86 VM + FT-891:lrwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi 12 Jan 3 19:26 /home/pi/.wine/dosdevices/com5 -> /dev/ttyUSB0) - You can then check permissions to see if your user account has access to your USB ports with
ls -l /dev/ttyUSB0(In my case on Debian x86 VM, this outputs:crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 1 Jan 3 19:50 /dev/ttyUSB0, which I think tells me that the user account didn't have permission to use the COM ports, just the root and dialout accounts) - You can add the current user account to the COM port 'dialout' group with
sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER && sudo reboot
Yes the script does not work with SSH - the script requires a “video” (X11) session to be active to be able to install, so VNC is the only headless install option.
Thinking over this more, the vara_only install should work basically the same as your manual install. I wonder if the COM port issue was a permissions issue (user account not included in the dialout permissions group)