Installing and Running the Garmin GNS-430 Simulator Under Wine on Fedora Linux

Posted on by Vinod Kutty
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2016.01.24.garmin-simulator-under-wine

The Garmin GNS-430 is a common GPS unit for General Aviation aircraft. Once upon a time it was cutting edge. Now it’s no longer manufactured, but there is a large installed base and most training programs will involve such a unit. As a student pilot, or even an experienced one trying to get the most use out of it, the simulator Garmin provides for download  here is very useful. The best time to familiarize yourself with it is on the ground in the safety of your home, not in the cockpit.

The simulator (technically called the “Garmin 400 Series Trainer”, supporting GPS 400, GNC 420, GNS 430 model emulation, with or without Terrain warning) only runs on Windows, but thanks to Wine , it’s possible to run it on Linux (in my case Fedora 23 x86_64) without the overhead and complexity of a VM. There are a few quirks, but it’s usable. Also note that some flight simulators such as X-Plane 10 Global Flight Simulator (PC & MAC) already have a basic GNS-430 simulator, but I haven’t used it and I don’t believe it’s as complete.
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IMAP Session Timeouts, IMAP IDLE, and Alpine’s “MAIL FOLDER CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR”

Posted on by Vinod Kutty
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GUIs are nice, but command line mail clients make me more productive with reduced stress on the human side of the UI (i.e. my fingers and wrists). On Linux, Pine, and now alpine have served me well for many years, despite some limitations in an increasingly HTML-bloated email world. The following is one issue that has annoyed me, related to some behind-the-scenes upgrades by my email provider some years ago. As usual, the the troubleshooting journey proved to be instructive about the behaviour of IMAP servers — specifically my provider’s implementation (based on Dovecot) of session timeouts.

The scenario: you’re logged in, browsing your INBOX or composing an email and suddenly get the error:

MAIL FOLDER "INBOX" CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR

which forces you to re-open the folder. Additionally, when replying to email, once the INBOX is closed, flag updates (such as Answered) don’t apply any more. This seemed to happen randomly, and for other folders I have open (not just in the INBOX). The error at first suggests a lock contention, but research suggested it was actually the connection being closed, and that forcing more frequent mail checks would help.

The first step was to establish a client-independent IMAP connection and leave it idle:

$ time openssl s_client -connect mailprovider:993 -quiet

... [SSL preamble snipped out ]
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN] Dovecot ready.
a1 LOGIN MYUSERNAME@DOMAIN MYPASSWORD
a1 OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE SORT SORT=DISPLAY THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=REFS MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT IDLE CHILDREN NAMESPACE UIDPLUS LIST-EXTENDED I18NLEVEL=1 CONDSTORE QRESYNC ESEARCH ESORT SEARCHRES WITHIN CONTEXT=SEARCH LIST-STATUS] Logged in
a2 EXAMINE INBOX
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft $Forwarded)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS ()] Read-only mailbox.
* 955 EXISTS
* 0 RECENT
* OK [UNSEEN 1] First unseen.
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 1156786977] UIDs valid
* OK [UIDNEXT 106677] Predicted next UID
* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 1] Highest
a2 OK [READ-ONLY] Select completed.
read:errno=0

real 2m24.046s
user 0m0.034s
sys 0m0.008s
$

(BOLD text represents commands from my end)
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