Winlink Airmail on Raspberry Pi working with Wine

[akopac]

I posted previously about getting PAT for winlink to work on a raspberry pi I’m running Opencpn/OpenPlotter on. I tried running Wine and Airmail and it worked!!! I was shocked. Even rig control worked. With a ic718 and Pactor modem. Over the years I tried this and the propagation and com port stuff wouldn’t play ball. It does now. Nice to have propagation prediction and the catalogs working. I do need to get a decent USB hub, but so far it’s working fairly well on a rpi4

[akopac]

Used box86 for emulation

[akopac]

This works with Buster and Bulseye Raspbian
Do all updates and upgrades
Followed this video to install wine.
https://youtu.be/UCuD5myL6Fc
The install goes through a pretty crazy update process ( it’s automated though).
Then download Airmail for ham radio from here
http://siriuscyber.net/airmail/down.htm
You can get Airmail for Sailmail at other locations
Go to system tools>wine program manager and installed it from downloads. ( you will have to change the file download type to .exe)
My Pactor modem is serial with a serial/usb 232 cable to the Pi. It seems to be the only com port to show up in the Airmail program. I copied the modem and radio settings from my windows system. Everything just worked perfect after that. I tried putting a USB hub between my Pi and the USB/serial adapter and adding my NMEA2000 USB adapter and USB Logitech keyboard mouse adapter, and my SSD boot drive to the hub and things got squirrely. I need a better hub or maybe to do some hard coding for serial assignments. Maybe somebody can chip in on hardware and software hard port assignment with Linux.
For me the huge value is being able to do propagation prediction tied to rig control and to have the full integration of winlink and sailmail catalogs for weather and routing on Opencpn without playing games with transferring files from my windows radio winlink/sailmail computer to my navigation computer. Attached is a picture of my settings in Airmail.

Go into tools>options>spellcheck
Turn off all options.
This is fully functional except spellcheck now
***************
Rig control
Propagation prediction
Winlink and airmail catalogs
All Good.
With not much noticeable speed loss and the x86 and wine are not interphased or seen while using airmail or other apps on the Pi after install. Attachment 1

[akopac]

Note it’s important to disable spellcheck or when composing email no text shows up :-)

[seandepagnier]

it seems like this would be very slow to emulate x86 then run wine?

You should consider contributing this addition to packaged raspberry pi images such as openplotter lysmarine bbn etc. I think others would be interested in using winlink by clicking just an icon to run it.

[akopac]

Originally Posted by seandepagnier

it seems like this would be very slow to emulate x86 then run wine?



You should consider contributing this addition to packaged raspberry pi images such as openplotter lysmarine bbn etc. I think others would be interested in using winlink by clicking just an icon to run it.

I don’t know. My expectations weren’t very high, but I was a bit surprised by the outcome. I did send the info to Mikhail over at BBN and I submitted a “How I did it” post on OpenPlotters Forum…. Not sure if Sailoog will spot it, but I don’t know how to contact him direct.
Here’s a link to a video I just posted. I’d be interested in your thoughts Sean. https://youtu.be/7nNg2hzZXRI

[akopac]

A more complete demo. https://youtu.be/ykYH93yvXZ8

[mgrouch]

Originally Posted by seandepagnier

it seems like this would be very slow to emulate x86 then run wine?



You should consider contributing this addition to packaged raspberry pi images such as openplotter lysmarine bbn etc. I think others would be interested in using winlink by clicking just an icon to run it.

I’ve added it to the documentation for BBN OS.
Pretty much copy/paste commands.
Install is a bit slow but it runs quite fast.


https://bareboat-necessities.github....l-install.html

[akopac]

Originally Posted by mgrouch

I’ve added it to the documentation for BBN OS.
Pretty much copy/paste commands.
Install is a bit slow but it runs quite fast.


https://bareboat-necessities.github....l-install.html

Yeah it does. I expected much slower

[mgrouch]

Originally Posted by akopac

Yeah it does. I expected much slower

Because it’s using box86 instead of qemu.
Box86 runs apps faster.