It’s the day after Field Day, and I’m too lazy to grab my old laptop that has TQSL and FLDigi on it to enter my logs. So I decided to install FLDigi and TQSL on my desktop machine instead.
Bad news, though: Ubuntu has an outdated version of TQSL, and the ARRL doesn’t provide a package for Ubuntu. Boo. However, building it was pretty painless, with only a few attempts. The result:
The machine I started with already had a basic development environment. But if yours doesn’t, you’ll probably need to grab a few things first:
$ sudo apt install make cmake gcc libappimage-dev
Next you need to download the latest file from arrl.org/tqsl-download and stash it somewhere on your filesystem. The day I tried it, the latest was tqsl-2.6.4.tar.gz. So…
$ tar xzvf tqsl-2.6.4.tar.gz
$ cd tqsl-2.6.4
I was happy to see a nice linux-make-appimage.sh script ready for consumption. If you look at the INSTALL file (which I didn’t) you’ll see you need to install a few prerequisites. I didn’t bother downloading them, but just used the ones that were already built for Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev liblmdb-dev libdb-dev libexpat1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libwxgtk-media3.0-gtk3-dev libzlcore-dev
$ sh ./linux-make-appimage.sh
After a few false starts (yes, it clones the repo every time you try to build) I ended up with a pretty TQSL-x86_64.AppImage in my build directory. I wanted to run that from the command line, so I did the following:
$ sudo apt remove trustedqsl # need to make sure the old package isn't there
$ sudo cp TQSL-x86_64.AppImage /usr/local/bin/TQSL_2.6.4-x86_64.AppImage
$ sudo chmod 555 /usr/local/bin/TQSL_2.6.4-x86_64.AppImage
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/TQSL_2.6.4-x86_64.AppImage /usr/local/bin/tqsl
That left me with a tqsl symbolic link pointing to /usr/local/bin/TQSL_2.6.4-x86_64.AppImage in /usr/local/bin (which is on my $PATH). That’s it!
Oh yeah, after all that I ended up having to boot the old laptop anyway. I needed to extract my old TQSL config (exported to tqslconfig.tbk) in order to import it to this version. When importing the preferences I got an error message about an unknown token, but it worked anyway… and I got the same message when importing into a Windows build that the ARRL created. Go figure.
I didn’t need to re-import my certs - they were already there.
Changes for TQSL 2.6.5
Looks like they broke the AppImage build in TQSL 2.6.5. If I try it on Ubunutu 22.04, I get:
ERROR: Icon entry missing in desktop file: AppDir/usr/share/applications/tqsl.desktop
So instead of the sh ./linux-make-appimage.sh above, I did the following:
$ cd /wherever you put it/tqsl-2.6.5
$ cmake .
$ make
And then created a shell script /usr/local/bin/tqsl to run tqsl from where I’d built it:
#!/bin/bash -
cd /wherever you put it/tqsl-2.6.5/apps
./tqsl
You can’t just copy the binary because it needs some libraries that it builds as well. I tried make install but that’s broken on Ubuntu 22.04 as well. Don’t forget:
$ sudo chmod 550 /usr/local/bin/tqsl