N1MM Contest Logger on Linux

[VE3NCQ]

I have been experimenting with the N1MM Contest Logging program on Linux. Since our club has several computers running Linux, it would be ideal to do our logging on this free platform. This section will detail my experiments in the hopes of getting N1MM to run reliably on Linux, and help others to accomplish this as well.

The test machine is a Pentium 3 GHz dual-core with 1 GB of RAM and 1 TB of drive space, of which 20 GB is in the Linux partition. It's connected to a standard wired network. The operating system is Debian Linux 2.6.24, with many custom-compiled packages.

Using WINE, N1MM didn't work. However, that changed after compiling the latest version of WINE, 1.1.21. Now, N1MM starts up fine. I'm testing many features and functions.

So far, every time a configuration change is made, N1MM crashes, but it remembers the change upon restart.

After considerable frustration, networking multiple computers now actually works great. The trick is to enter the IP address for the WINE proxy under "Edit Station Computer Names," not the Linux machine IP address. All the other network machines use the actual Linux IP address. In this case, the Linux machine is 192.168.0.5. All the other network computers use this IP in their configuration. However, N1MM on the Linux machine requires 127.12.34.56 (or whatever it is on your machine).

Logging contacts works great - EXCEPT - any non-North American calls cause a crash with error 5. This may not be too great a problem for Field Day, but this is where my troubleshooting will concentrate for now.

[VE3NCQ]

Here is some debugging information for anyone following this:

Entering a non-North America callsign crashes N1MM as soon as the second alphanumeric character of the call is entered. The Visual Basic runtime error is #5 - Invalid procedure or call. Typically this error happens when a program expects one kind of data, but receives another. I've had this error happen in my own programs when the wrong data corrupts a formula, like using a long where an integer is defined.

N1MM debugging log (crash happens at bold procedure)
  418542.322 - Start Country FindCountry
  418542.334 (0.012) - End Country FindCountry

The WINE debugger says: fixme:ole:IEnumConnections_Next_Proxy not implemented

I suspect that WINE has an unimplemented stub that is returning invalid data to an N1MM api call, which then crashes because the returned data is incorrect. This may have to be taken up with the WINE developers, unless anyone out there has ideas.

After clearing the runtime error, this is the WINE debug info:

err:heap:HEAP_ValidateInUseArena Heap 0x88a0000: prev arena 0x88a23f8 is not prev for in-use 0x88a2ea8
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000001 at address 0x1 (thread 0059), starting debugger...
Error dialog "The Program N1MM Logger.exe has encountered a serious problem and needs to close..."
Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000001 in 32-bit code (0x00000001).
Register dump:
 CS:0073 SS:007b DS:007b ES:007b FS:0033 GS:003b
 EIP:00000001 ESP:0033f95c EBP:0033f97c EFLAGS:00010206(  R- --  I   - -P- )
 EAX:088a0098 EBX:00000000 ECX:088a2f50 EDX:0000000c
 ESI:00000000 EDI:00000000
and so on...