For some time now I've been thinking of streamlining my setup. Using a large and ageing tower PC with keyboard and everything else takes up quite a lot of space in my small 'shack'. I recently acquired a 64 bit laptop. The tower PC was running Windows 10 and was getting slower with each update. In addition to this, I was getting spurious lock-ups and crashes mid contact which wasn't very good. It seemed like a good time to change over to a Linux operating system. Because the laptop was a 64 bit machine, I figured it would have no problem supporting the latest that Linux had to offer. Because I have had some experience with Debian, I decided to install the latest Debian 12.5. Everything went pretty well, apart from a few slip-ups with registering Dialout and TTY in groups. This is required for setting up any USB control functions. A little Googling sorted out my problems. I then moved on to installing the requisite apps to control my rig and to operate on FT4 / 8 with WSJT-X. I also installed Gridtracker as I had before on 'Windoze'. I can't believe how much faster the response is using this system now. Start-up and shut-down times have been reduced to mere seconds.
Since I had been using MSHV for my FT4 / 8 work, it took me a little while to familiarise myself with WSJT-X, but now everything is flying. Just a shame the propagation is so bad at the moment.
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