On Tue, 3 Jan 2023 09:00:20 -0600 Ken Hansen ken@n2vip.org wrote:
Shipping a complete Ubuntu installation in a VM just to have CHIRP pre-installed seems a bit of over-kill. Typically a single line command would install CHIRP, wouldn't it?
CHIRP is 20-40 megabytes, a full GUI install of Ubuntu is measured in gigabytes.
There's other distributions aside from Ubuntu. AlpineLinux is tiny for example. Gentoo also would let you build "just what you need" into a LiveCD. You usually don't need the full Gnome 3 desktop that Ubuntu typically ships, you need just enough to launch CHIRP and make it usable.
Perhaps add to this some hotplug USB storage smarts to enable auto-mounting of removable storage for those not used to bringing up a command line and manually mounting volumes. It'd still be hundreds of MiB, but likely significantly below 1GiB.
Another approach would be a Live environment that bundled CHIRP along with other amateur radio software (e.g. SDR tools, digital modes, etc) which might increase the size a little, but might then allow the environment to do more than just "program radios".
I did make a (command-line-only) LiveCD once using Gentoo's catalyst tool, and while I didn't get UEFI booting working, I did get a useful LiveCD that booted and contained tools sufficient for doing system rescue work. Maybe I should re-visit that.
Regards,