Probably the only program I miss not having available to me under Linux is the excellent STSPLUS by Dave Ransom. Since this is available only in an MS-DOS version, I've had to make do with the various hacks detailed on the Linux Satellite Tracking page. I've now discovered that there is a way to make STSPLUS work on a Linux box, using a DOS emulation package called dosemu.

Note: If you do decide to download a copy of STSPLUS as a result of what you read here, please take note of the request that the author makes for a (small and entirely optional) donation to help fund the continued development of this fine piece of software.

Also note: I know this sounds obvious, but there are always those who need to be explicitly told...if you have problems getting this to work, do not e-mail or otherwise contact Dave Ransom hoping for assistance. He won't know what your talking about. I'm happy to try to answer any queries, but as I've only set this up under Mandrake 9.2, your mileage may vary if you're using a different Linux distribution to me.

The screen shot below shows STSPLUS running under Mandrake 9.2 on my Dell laptop:

Setting this up is simplicity itself:

1. Download the dosemu binary from this link. Save it in your home directory.
2. Open a shell session, and type tar -zxvf dosemu-1.1.99.1-bin.tgz
3. Now download the FreeDOS binary from this link. Save this in your home directory too.
4. Go back to your shell session and type tar -zxvf dosemu-freedos-b9-bin.tgz
5. Type cd ~/dosemu/freedos
6. Type mkdir stsplus
7. Download the latest version of STSPLUS from this link. Save the file in ~/dosemu/freedos/stsplus.
8. Type cd ~/dosemu, then type ./xdosemu. This should give you a DOS-in-a-Box window, where you'll find yourself at a "C:\>" prompt.
9. Type cd stsplus, followed by sop0123, followed by stsplus, and you should find that you have STSPLUS running on your Linux machine! You can now proceed to set up your location details just as if you were running the software natively.