It would be helpful on this site to add a button to an additional page for HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS.

Simply saying it should work on computers made in the last 12 years is not enough information. I know because I have found three of my own that it will not run on or that parts of the laptop hardware no longer functions because of lack of drivers etc.

The page should list the various additional hardware that the kernel supports.. types video cards, printers, network cards and so on.

Such a page with list of requirements would help a potential user evaluate whether Navigatrix will suit their needs bearing in mind that even with software like Download Accelerator.. it takes about 8 days to download Navigatrix at 54kbps by modem.

Thanks for considering this.

It consumes a lot of resources to make a distribution which works perfect with all the different hardware combinations available. Even only testing all the hardware is almost impossible at the stage where we are right now.
Instead we could agree on the best possible hardware combination which consumes as little power as possible, is as robust as possible. Maybe even waterproof. And last no least affordable. There may be other aspects to consider as well... (amount of serial ports, usb ports, integrated gps, one or to screens, expandability and so on....)
Several Navigatrix users already experiment with different hardware platforms and maybe one of those or one of the others which are in the production pipeline and mentioned here in the forum could become the reference hardware.
Once we have the reference hardware we can perfectly adapt the operating system to the possibilities of the device.

re suggested hardware:
I like the MK802 devices. Little PC comes in a USB thumbdrive case, has a 1GHz ARM processor, 1GB Ram and 4 GB SSD, a couple of USB connectors and micro SD slot. Runs Android 4 out of the box.

Has dual boot capability by inserting a linux SD card, runs Ubuntu and other distros.

Draws 1-2 Watt and can be connected to any HDMI TV screen.

When not in use as a navigatrix it still offers a full android 4 environment, capable of showing 1080 HD videos.

For now it would be nice to stick to x86 hardware to allow the use of airmail. There is currently no way to do ssb and pactor emails with linux software. So we have to use wine which does not run on ARM processors.

honestly I doubt that there is so much future need for SSB at least for emails. These days a full installation of SSB and a modern modem is much more expensive than going the Satphone route for passage weather and emails.

SSB only pays off if you use emails heavily or think about several years (but then airtime will be cheaper so ROI time will be longer).

But anyway, I understand that you need to stick to one architecture for simplicity reasons. And satphones don't work on ARM i guess.

Sat phones will work anywhere you can create a ppp connection. l also think there clearly is a place for HF (SSB) packet transmissions.

Yes there are high start up cost with SSBs. Many have already bought the ticket....like me. However, my SSB radio packed it in, so to speak, and I picked up a sat phone to tide me over until I could get this sorted out.

The sat phone is brutally slow. The OS on the sat phone is crude and clumsy. It also rubs me raw when I drop a connection and ultimately spent 20 bucks downloading a 15KB grib.

But at the end of the season....who knows...I'm not counting emails not sent or other self-limiting behavior....or SMS texts that were sent...and on it goes.

However, I do think there is the stuff out there....libraries and talent...just laying around waiting to
create an open source application that will function like Airmail including the newer hardware independent protocols......

I also think some bright folk should orchestrate a community based data compression proxy service for the bandwidth impaired...be they sat phone users or some schlub sitting at an internet cafe in Tonga....I know.

I used an isatphone with prepaid card, the software and service from onsatmail.com (came free with the preaid card).

It cost around 2 minutes (or 1.50 EUR) for the daily GRIB and a couple of pure text emails. We used about 70 airtime minutes over a one year period, cruising the Med and the caribbean. Of course using Wifi & UMTS whenever in sight of land.

May be a completely different story if one is going into areas with little or no Wifi / UMTS coverage but even then...

Would be very interested in what brand and model of phone you used, as well as prepaid card. Im in Canada and not aware of such a service here, but that matters little as coverage is global so the point of sale if no important.

/ch

The phone is an inmarsat iSatPhone Pro, prepaid card was bought via internet in Austria at brandspot.at but I know the ones they sell at AccastillageDiffusion in France and Spain are using the same provider.
The provider is called AST located in the UK.
They provide a software called uuplus and an email account at onsatmail.com, that has nice features (like denial of large messages, including a nice reply to the sender, server side filtering, compression, etc) and the software is much more efficient than POP & SMTP protocols. I'd guess it cuts connection time at least by 50-70% for small text emails, but much less for large pre-compressed mails (like jpeg images).

Please note that iSatPhone prepaid plans are blocked in the US, the phone makes a position check first and denies service in and around the territory of the USA. I heard this ban was to be lifted but haven't checked back.

In the next month I'm going to start testing server configurations to use some of the WAN optimization and proxy tools that are out there.

I've learned that when you're out in the boonies and you don't want make a career or spend the family fortune on your internet activities it can be pretty difficult at times.

I online bank. I get a request for a survey, "What do you think our website?"

I'm a little peeved because it's too graphic intensive. To get to the real reason I'm there I have to wait for the stock photos of all the happy, beautiful people who ostensibly bank there. They are big. They are slow...and the warm fuzzy feeling I suppose to get sours into frustration.

I'm a bit familiar with web design for low bandwidth connections. They are tools that deliver the information requested....first. So I think, "what the heck?"...and went to the survey website and began filling out the form giving thoughtful and constructive opinions how they could better serve their customers squatting next to the closed Post Office of a little village in the middle of nowhere who suffers from high latency, lost packets and limited battery power.

...it then took me 20 minutes to get and maintain a connection long enough to send the dang thing off.

Or...you're waiting for an email confirmation from some important something and an occasional email friend sends a part picture of people you don't know, one of the dog, and
another he has sent twice before.

This 2.5MB beauty is in the queue before your awaited email and the server keeps timing out half way through the photo of the dog.

It's not that he doesn't have a nice dog. I want to see it....just later.

I think we can do better than this..after the first of the year I might need some volunteers to see if we can have a practical solution.

This is exactly what the onsatmail.com and uuplus do. Beside allowing to just block any mail above a cconfigurable size you can also configure different filter and mail sizes for your different internet connections. like a 20k limit on your satphone, a 1MB limit on the mobile and unlimited on Wifi. It will forward large emails to another address if you want to, and / or reply to the sender.
It can split the mail from the attachment and only deliver the text part.
Or deliver only the headers and selectively get the bodies and / or attachments later.
It can send an free SMS notification to the satphone on arrival of new emails.

And it does compression, removal of unused mime parts, and uses a protocol completely different to POP and SMTP. No waiting for dozens of request / response pairs on high latency networks, it's just one request no matter how many emails are there. Sending and receiving is done in parallel, so sending is free while retrieving (also in contrast to most mail clients that first receive and then send).
And of course it can pick up from where a previous connection dropped.

It's configured once and then only used, but you can reconfigure locally and it will synchronize the new settings on the next connect.

Overall really nice package and a huge money saver on satphones. As said, we used 70 minutes / 60 EUR for the trips Gibraltar => Canaries => Capverdes => Barbados. That is daily weather GRIBs (local and big picture) and emails on roughly 26 days at sea plus a few days where we had no other connection. I guess we would have run through a few hundret bucks without this email tool.

Thanks for the link to iridium. Interesting. Phone is about 600 dollarsUS is you shop around and cards start at 20US. However this softeware does not run on lilnux does it? I see only windows and mac support at this time. Its there a workaround with wine?

Best and many thanks.

/ch

I don't know if there stuff will fly under Wine. This is something I was thinking of working on in January....unless someone else beats me to the punch.

I think *something* is available....I just don't know at the moment.

I tried the Linux version of UUPlus from uuplus.com and it was non-functional; too many runtime errors to even get the application to open.

I installed the Windows version under Wine and it seems to work...ok. There are a few graphics issues with the applications main window, and I didn't attempt the email client integration....so I'm not much help.

I'll be checking further when I'm not limited to 40MBs (or 1 hour whichever comes first) every 3 hours with my current connection.

Using Wine can cause effectively problems 'cause of shared memory or available amount of memory shared by VM and video.
The best way is to use Global Marine Network (GMN) XGate.
http://www.globalmarinenet.com/product/xgate/
http://downloads.globalmarinenet.com/downloads/IsatPhone_Pro_Setup_Linux.pdf

Just want to mention that you might use xgate to establish an internet connection and the use sylpheed for you email needs. And you can do this even WITHOUT susbscribing to any of the xgate service plans. This might be usefull if the sat connection software inside navigatrix is not working with your phone.

Thanks David.
That means we must buy a RedPort Optimizer (170$) but not the XGate suite?

No....you dont have to buy anything. Just connect the phone to the laptop and dial using satphone connection tool or using xgate. If you use xgate you can use it without buying any xgate plan. I can explain you how to configure it if you want.