ARRL's LoTW with Debian Sarge
Hello everyone.
For most on this list what I'm about describe is probably old hat, but
there may be some newcomers that would find this helpful in the list
archives.
As most are probably aware, the American Radio Relay League has been
working for a few years on a way to digitally sign log submissions for
electronic application for their various awards. In the October 2003
issue of QST (Amateur Windows? 8-) it has been announced that this
program was opened to general use as of 15 September 2003. On the
Logbook of The World web page:
http://www.arrl.org/lotw/
there is a library and programs for signing and generating log data for
Linux. These programs are provided in binary form only for Red Hat 7.2
and 8.0 releases and are RPMs. Also provided are source RPMs for the
library and the applications. These archives are not directly
installable as managed packages on my Linux distribution of choice,
Debian, so they must be converted using a utility called Alien.
Having never needed Debian's Alien before, I decided this was as good of
a time as any to try it. I grabbed the RH 8.0 RPMs and the source RPMs,
just in case.
I installed alien, rpm, libwxbase2.4, and libwxgtk2.4 as the web page
said the programs depended on WXWin 2.4.
Converting the RPMs to .deb's was straightforward with alien and
installation with dpkg completed without error. I attempted to start
tqsl, but the startup failed. A quick ldd /usr/bin/tqsl revealed a
dependency on libcrypto.so.2 that was not found. Using the package
search page on the Debian site:
http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages
I found that it was a part of the libssl0.9.7 and libssl0.9.6 packages,
the latter version being in the oldlibs section.
Well, I created a symlink to libcrypto.so.0.9.7 named libcrypto.so.2:
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.7 libcrypto.so.2
(actually I used Midnight Commander, but this is generic--don't forget
you'll need to be root as these files reside in /usr/lib) and tried
again. Running tqsl worked fine, but tqslcert failed with a relocation
error.
Poking around in the README in the tqsllib archive I found where the
library is dependent on OpenSSL 0.9.6. So I redid my symlink to point
to libcrypto.so.0.9.6 and tqslcert loaded and ran.
In tqslcert I was able to create my certificate request and am now
waiting for the authentication process.
One quirk or bug I noticed in tqslcert is that if the Help button is
clicked and then the help window is backgrounded, the window that called
the help window is frozen and will remain so until the help window is
closed. This may be a problem in WxWin, I don't know.
So there you have it, my micro-HOWTO on LoTW on Debian Sarge (Testing).
73, de Nate >>
P.S. I keep this system updated about once per week. An older Testing
snapshot may or may not work. The same caveat may apply to Sid
(Unstable).
--
Wireless | Amateur Radio Station N0NB | "We have awakened a
Internet | n0nb@networksplus.net | sleeping giant and
Location | Bremen, Kansas USA EM19ov | have instilled in him
Amateur radio exams; ham radio; Linux info @ | a terrible resolve".
http://www.qsl.net/n0nb/ | - Admiral Yamamoto
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