What is LinPac

There are many packet radio terminals around the world. Most of them are developed and maintained by a single developer or a small group and their capabilities are adapted to some local packet radio environment. If you want to use such terminal, you will probably find out that you are never going to use the of its functions, but there are some functions missing.

LinPac is an attempt to create a packet radio terminal that could be easily extended and reconfigured to meet the needs of anybody. The main aims of the development are:

Develop a reliable terminal core with reduced set of functions and define an unified application interface that would allow adding new functions by creating the applications.
Create basic set of applications which are commonly used and are expected in every packet radio terminal (file transfer protocols, etc.)

What is LinPac like

Here are some of the most importatnt features of the stable releases. If you are missing some feature you can take a look at the unstable releases which contain some new features that are being tested. If you have some basic skills in programming you can help developing LinPac.

Terminal core:

Text-mode (console or terminal window) user interface, driven by commands (graphical user interface is available for the unstable releases)
Eight channels for simultaneous connections, each with it's own scroll-back buffer (almost boundless)
The console supports on-line character conversion (user defined), ANSI color sequences are supported
User-defined macros that allow to define new commands for frequently used operations and automatic responses very easily (many examples are available including a simple conference server
Completely reconfigurable reactions to incomming connections and other events
A station database that allows to specify a set of features for each callsign (e.g. passwords, character encoding, etc.) and that allows LinPac to act differently for each station connected
On-line text compression support (huffman)
New functions can be added using external programs (standard Linux programs and commands or special LinPac applications)

Commonly used applications:

Automatic logbook
File transfer protocols: autobin, yapp, automatic saving of 7plus files
Automatic login or sysop password checking for TNOS, FBB, FlexNet, TheNet etc..
A mail cilent for F6FBB BBS that allows to send and receive messages using a compressed transfer.

Requirements

LinPac requires following things to run correctly

An X86 or ARM computer with Linux (2.6.x+ kernel is preferred).
Packet radio hardware i.e. a TNC or soundcard setup
AX.25 subsystem properly configured. That means AX.25 packages installed and modems and ports configred and working (you can check this by entering listen command in your system, if you can see the packet radio traffic it's probably ok). An AX25-HOWTO can be found in links.

Installation instructions

All the LinPac releases are available as the source code package. For installing the package just do following things:

Login as root
Unpack the archive using
```
tar xvfz LinPac-0.XX.tar.gz
```

Compile and install the software using

cd LinPac-0.XX
./configure
make
make install

If you are new to LinPac read the User Manual that is available in documentation.

More information about the installation can be found in the INSTALL file that is contained in each packages. Note that some LinPac releases are also available as the RPM packages.

Developers are welcome

As I have written above, one single developer can never implement all the functions needed anywhere because every local area has its own specifics. If you have some skills in C/C++ and you would like to implement any new function in LinPac (e.g. new type of password checking, file transfer protocol or anything else), then please take look at the documentation and/or contact us on the Linpac forums.

Page last updated: Jan 26, 2015