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Table of Contents
reformatting from N6CTA's blog post
Direwolf and LinBPQ on Raspberry Pi
Preface
This is largely derived from the first post N6CTA wrote in a series detailing how to get on HF with packet radio using John Wiseman, G8BPQ’s suite of PBBS software, and John Langner, WB2OSZ’s software TNC, Direwolf using the Linux operating system. Much of the series was geared towards meeting the goal of setting up a well functioning, always-on, reboot safe, packet bulletin board system. When possible, we've have tried to denote what is optional and what is not depending on the goal of being either a casual K2K OP with maybe an account on someone else’s machine or being the sysop of a full service HF BBS.
This is likely a weekend project at minimum if you have minimal Linux experience, but those with linux chops and BBS experience can likely get it all sorted in just a few hours. There’s no sugar coating the config files – but taken as-is on a clean system, they should work well.
Why Direwolf?
N6CTA choose to use Direwolf as the software modem in this series as it appeared to the most performant and stable 300Bd FX.25 soft modem available for Linux. We've also investigated QtSoundModem
and found it to be a little more challenging to use. This is still an imperfect solution as Direwolf doesn’t integrate as cleanly as it could with BPQ’s AGW driver. BPQ treats Direwolf (and all AGW ports) like a KISS TNC instead of allowing the TNC to handle some of the AX.25 stuff it’s good at. WB2OSZ’s OSI comments on why L1 and L2 need to be tightly coupled make a lot of sense and the AGW protocol allows for this kind of behavior but it does not appear to be implemented properly in BPQ.
Note on Debian as the OS
Note: I am listing Debian package names for the libraries throughout the series. If you’re on some other flavor, you’ll likely need to sort out the exact package names from your distribution’s repository. No exotic libraries are being used though and if you can live with using your distribution’s versions of some of this software, by all means, use your repository’s packages. In the case of using a Raspberry Pi, it makes more sense to me to use Raspberry Pi OS (Debian Bookworm fork as of this writing) and compile the new software from source. We're recommending compiling from source for these components in order to get the latest and greatest, although this requires a little extra work to get set up and chance for new bugs.
Boilerplate yadda yadda, YMMV. Let’s get on with it.