Well, this is easy. There was no logbook working under Linux, that did what I wanted a logbook to do. At least it must be relational. When you enter a call, you must get the dxcc at once. A good logbook also can give you an answer to simple questions as there are : did I work that station before ? How many different dxcc's do I have on a given band ? What are the call's I still have to write-out my qsl-card(s) for ? ...
So one of those days (ca. xx-03-2001) I was drinking a pint of beer in the local clubstation where i discussed this issue with some friends. They said MySQL was the thing that I needed. I had already heard of SQL. And "well", they said, "MySQL is the thing you need". I had never worked before with a PC so this was all new to me. I did make a logbook before for my Apple Macintosh (with FileMaker PRO), but MySQL seemed to be something completely different.
And this is where Koen, on5dqz ( ex on1dqz) , comes in. He suggested to do this with PHP and Apache as the server. Of course, I had never heard of PHP or Apache .... .
But I started to learn MySQL and that part was not too difficult. PHP in the beginning was very difficult. But I can call myself very lucky that I have Koen, who really is a computer specialist. Without his help - this must be very clear - there maybe was no LiHaLo. He started with the basic php-scripts and helped me a lot with it. MySQL is strong and very powerfull, but it is command-line based. So for practical use this is not good : it is to slow, especialy in a contest.
Well: a computer (yeah right!), maybe not to slow .... . Like always : the faster the better ..... . Typically, you would be running some Linux distribution on your PC, but every system that runs Apache, MySQL and HP is ok for running LiHaLo, so it even runs on windows en the RC3 runs great on MAC OS X 10.3 (Panther) .
You will need to have
More on this can be found in the next section.
In this helpfile, everything will be based on what you see when you use Mozilla 1.3.1 (and a 17 inch monitor) at a resolution OF 1024 * 768 , 16 million colors, 24bits.
I also assume you have an internetconnection, the faster, the better.
This is the INCLUDED help file. It's intention is to get you going and to show the basics of how LiHaLo works.
It is not a complete manual. For that we refer to the ONLINE-HELP .
Well, maybe the picture down below is a good way to show you what you can expect : (reduced in size )