It’s more than 3 months since our last CQRLOG release. We are not sleeping, we are working on brand new CQRLOG version.

For long time CQRLOG was application suitable to run from user’s home directory. It has advantages but also a few disadvantages. The big disadvantage is that CQRLOG couldn’t be part of distribution’s repositories and a lot of people didn’t have any chance to learn about it. We decided to make big change and leave this concept. Our decision was made around version 0.9.4.

We used Firebird embedded for almost three years in CQRLOG development as database because it was created to be used from the same directory as program binary file. It worked very well and was fast. But I didn’t find any chance how to use it with binaries in /usr/bin etc. I had googled for quite long time, also asked for help in lists but without any success. Finally, I decided to use MySQL as database server.

I did a lot of work to move program to MySQL. It was very fast, development was very comfortable after solving a few problems with development environment. I have to rewrite a lot of SQL queries, create new table structures, rewrite a lot of code. But after few months all stopped because of MySQL problems with installation in various Linux distributions.

The the second attempt was with SQLITE database and took a few weeks. Everything was fine till I need to open two transaction simultaneously. No chance. Maybe I should do more tests before starting to develop with it. Truth is, I did a few tests but not with two opened transactions. It’s needed for DXCluster thread, bandmap etc. So it was wrong way, again.

I was very frustrated after months of work, so I did a break for a few weeks. It helped me a lot and I started to think how to solve this annoying problem. Finally, I found a solution - MySQL embedded version. So I did a rollback in SVN and returned to version with MySQL. Not so much modifications were needed to get it work with embedded version so I have working version quite soon. It was very buggy but worked! This version also has Makefile script, so there is a few CQRLOG users who compile it from SVN. Big step ahead. They help me to find bugs.

So what are the main news?
- CQRLOG is ready to be packaged ( now have only deb packages for Ubuntu)
- native 32bit and 64bit versions
- support multiple logs
- membership is tracking according to members’ numbers (if club doesn’t have numbers, callsigns are used)
- config file is stored directly to main database so if you open you log from another computer, the settings will be still the same
- windows like Grayline, Detail info, DX cluster etc. are auto-opened only if they were opened when CQRLOG was closed
- new faster ADIF import
- CQRLOG can be used on local computer with MySQL embedded or use MySQL server running on other machine
- and more things I forget :-)

So please stay tuned, deb files for Ubuntu will be released soon. Thank you for your patience.