Enthusiasm for hobbies waxes and wanes over time. I mean - some days, I’m real keen to go curling, some days I can’t be arsed. Some days, I blog, most days I don’t.

The things that ceaselessly continue to fascinate me, however, are the inner workings of computers and radios.
Of course - I work in telecomms, so radios and networks kinda keep themselves on my periphery at all times and I get to have fascinating discussions about them, like,all the time.It’s cool. So, last time on hibby’s exciting blog of joy I said that I broke my nexus 7 into the real world of linux, not the java-sandboxed-happy-appy kinda-linux world that is android. Well, I’ve been living with it and I have mixed feelings. Here are some of them for you to peruse, traveller.
Ubuntu on nexus 7 is fantastic. I love the idea, I love the capability that it offers, I love my hardware and I’ve been yearning for something similar for a while. Just so happened that Ubuntu were first past the post.

BUT…
It does come with some caveats. What it isn’t is a tablet OS. Straight up. What’s happened is that a desktop/laptop/netbook OS has been given hardware capability for a platform that just so happens to be used in a tablet device.
So - day to day tablet things become impossible, and you don’t realise it until it’s happened. Screen lock, for instance, doesn’t exist here - the screen dims and turns off. This is fine - I’ve set it for 1 minute timeout, but it makes reading difficult.
Webpages are difficult too, actually. Using a finger to manage the scroll bar in you browser ofchoice is difficult - pages skip and things get weird. Suspending the system to ram saves loads of battery, it’s great, but it’s hard - it requires a few screen touches, and if I’m in a hurry that’s a pain.
There’s other stuff, but these are my main issues. They’re all listed as bugs on the official bugtracker, so that’s good.
Regardless, I don’t care about them that much as it’s just so damn cool! I love it!

So: I said my goals were to install KDE.  Did it, was good - plagued by the same input issues, sadly, and plasma active wasn’t included as default.
Sad Hibby. I’ll be investigating e17 next!

What else? Oh - yeah aprsmap. That works, which is really cool.

I had to install (from the top!) libgtk2.0-dev, libsoup-gnome2.4-dev, osmgpsmap-dev, libsqlite3-dev .. these are all in the ubuntu repos. If you’re foolish enough to follow me on my quest, it’s

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libsoup-gnome2.4-dev osmgpsmap-dev libsqlite3-dev

Yeeah, boii, almost all good to go. Next up, my personal favourite, libfap! Get that source code downloaded, get some

./configure && make && sudo make install

on the go because you’re a total badass and then make some shared library magic happen by using dh_make and debuild.
Admittedly, I had some issues at this point, but where it crapped out I could copy the files that live in the subfolders ../debian/libfap-dev/usr to the same subfolders in /usr, and you’ll be good to build, once you’ve cloned the source from git…

./waf configure and then ./waf gets you it built…

build/aprsmap will run it, and then the (ham radio) universe is yours (to map)!

Okay, I admit that was an awful description of how I did things, but that’s fine - it works, you don’t really care and it’s cool - the people that do care know how to translate Hibby into making things work…

Resource usage is low - i’ve had it plotting all uk stations for well over an hour and dragging the map around // zooming only peaks at 15% cpu usage, ram usage is down at 2-3%. YMMV, of course.

Once I find a ligher weight DE (i.e not unity), I’ll see how performance improves on the whole system.

Can’t wait.

Oh, and here’s the obligatory terribad cam picture to prove it works:

How does this relate to what I said at the start?
It’s making radios and the insides of computers talk, obviously - that counts as doing hobbies, doesn’t it?

Hxx