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xastir

APRS client with real maps — see and be seen on the packet network

What it does

Plots APRS stations, objects, weather reports and messages on a map, and transmits your own position and messages. It takes data from a TNC or soundmodem on RF, from an APRS-IS internet feed, or both at once, and it reads GPS from gpsd for a moving station.

Why you would want it

APRS is the network that answers "where is everyone" during an event or an emergency, and Xastir is the full-featured Linux client for it -- not a position beacon but the whole picture, with messaging, weather station integration and the map layers that make a public-service deployment legible. It is the tool that turns a set of packets into a situation.

Before it will work

A callsign, which APRS transmits in clear and which identifies you. RF operation needs a TNC or a soundmodem such as Direwolf, and access to the serial or audio device. Maps are the real setup: Xastir supports many formats and ships with very little, so obtaining map data for your area is a step nothing does for you -- and the project's own website, which is where that documentation lived, is currently unreachable (see below).

How it installs

  • apt: xastir
  • AHRL runs this early because it believes the package creates an xastir-ax25 group, and follows it with chmod o+x /usr/bin/xastir (inventory unit 8). Measured on Debian 13 on 2026-08-28 by installing the package in a container: /usr/bin/xastir is already 0755 root:root and no xastir-ax25 group exists. Both steps are no-ops on this target, so neither is carried. This is what PARITY-POLICY means by not inheriting a verdict -- the workaround was true once and the manifest does not repeat it because AHRL still does.

Known problems

Unaffected by Linux 7.1's removal of the kernel AX.25 stack for its Serial KISS TNC and AGWPE interface types, which need no kernel stack. Only the "AX.25 TNC" interface type (DEVICE_AX25_TNC in src/interface.c) opens an AF_AX25 socket, and that one fails on 7.1 with "Address family not supported by protocol". See docs/reference/kernel-ax25.md. The map configuration is the part everyone struggles with, and an empty map looks like a broken program rather than a missing data file. APRS is not private: your position, your callsign and your messages are relayed globally and archived by several public sites indefinitely. Beaconing from a home station at a rate suited to a moving vehicle is the most common way to annoy a local network.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

The project is alive and its website is not. xastir.org and www.xastir.org have no DNS record at all (checked 2026-08-28) -- that is what Debian declares as the Homepage, and what the GitHub repository still declares too. The repository itself is active: head of master is 33a56e58d527, 2026-07-29, read from the branch rather than from GitHub's updated_at (D-032). Issues there are the working support route; the mailing lists the dead site linked could not be checked.

Source: catalog/packages/xastir.yaml