• Virtual Insanity @lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Great, you can accomplish the bare essentials with Linux.

    Now how do I install a program called chirp for programming 2 way radios?

    Searched for a week and gave up as each set of instructions lead down a broken, redundant dependency rabbit hole with no solution in sight, Flatpack this, snap that, no explanation or even a searchable clue that could begin me a solution.

    In windows I just unzip the nightly build to a directory of my choice, run the executable and it works.

    Sure… Not everyone knows or needs to know about these edge case applications, but point stands, it works in windows, and everyone encounters an edge case sooner or later.

    I’m keen to ditch the Microsoft hole, and I have no issue with making an effort to learn, but I can’t afford to or my life in hold for hours or days at a time in order to accomplish things that already work in seconds.

    I think my simple issue here is… I’m not incompetent. I can comfortably navigate a fine system in a shell, can mount and unmount, can tar -xvzf a tarball, can do most things up to writing a shell script from scratch (could cobble something

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      I just installed chirp on my Linux Mint machine from the GUI package manager. It’s packaged as a .deb file. Don’t know what your issue is.

    • Chobbes@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Huh. I’ve used chirp under Linux before and I just installed it with my package manager. Maybe it wasn’t available on your distro? Then it can get a lot more tricky. The other problem with these things can be permissions… once you have chirp installed maybe you need to add your user to the dial out group in order to be able to use the serial port to flash the radios.

    • GravelPieceOfSword@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      No software is guaranteed to run on all platforms: the developers choose to make it available or not.

      I did some quick googling, and it seems fairly easy to install it:

      Use Ubuntu (if you’re not familiar with, and don’t want to be familiar with terminal basics), and install chirp from the Ubuntu App store. Snap is just a name of their package format, and their app store links to snap craft.

      If you’re not using Ubuntu, that’s your choice, you’ll either have to install snap, then do the same, but it’s more work. Or play with the terminal just a bit to follow their instructions.

      Details

      If you’re on Ubuntu or have snap installed - it’s a one click operation to install chirp: https://snapcraft.io/chirp-snap

      If you’re on another distribution by choice: https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/ChirpOnLinux

      this page has a 3 step install for mainstream Linux distributions:

      1. Install dependencies (they’ve listed the commands)
      2. Install chirp and Python dependencies (commands provided)
      3. Run chirp