ax25-apps

I recently discovered the AX.25 utilities for amateur radio operators and found them to be incredibly useful. These utilities have been designed to work with the Linux kernel, but with some effort, they could be ported to other operating systems as well.

AX.25 is a network protocol that is mainly used for wireless networks. To use a network protocol, you typically need two things: operating system support and utilities that manipulate or communicate with the operating system. Fortunately, Linux has had AX.25, Net/ROM, and ROSE support for some time now. These packages fulfill the second requirement and have been separated into three distinct parts to make support and development more straightforward.

The set of applications provided by AX.25 utilities can be used by either a system administrator or a regular user. These programs use the protocol, rather than being required for setting up networks. I found the applications to be easy to use, and they worked well on my Linux machine.

This latest release includes several new features and bug fixes. The new rosedump.c from Jean-Paul and changes to ax25rtd for kernel 2.2.13 from Hubert F5LCT addressed some issues with the previous version. There is also a fix for ax25rtd in VC mode and a patch from Hans that enables better compatibility with newer GCCs. The doc directories are now relocatable, and the new version includes Jens' patches. Additionally, ax25rtd has been adapted to the latest kernel-ax25, and ax25-learn-only-mine has to be set to "true" for all interfaces to work correctly.

Overall, I found the AX.25 utilities to be valuable for any amateur radio operator looking to work with wireless networks. I highly recommend this set of applications if you need to use the AX.25 protocol with your Linux system.