Since PiAware is a Raspbian Linux distro, it would seem that I could run it as a VMware VM. Has anyone tried this? Or any tips/resources to aid me in doing this.
Or, is there a dump1090 (I assume that is the process that is doing all the work) the will run on a Linux distro supported by VMWare (e.g. SUSE, REdHat, Debian…).
If I can sort all this out, I will be happy to post my setup after it is up and running.
I don’t think VMware will do ARM emulation, will it?
QEMU will work - at least enough that I can build with userspace emulation on an Ubuntu host. Haven’t tried full machine emulation yet.
However your best bet is to run it natively, there’s really nothing ARM-specific in there.
Both piaware-mutability and dump1090-mutability will work on Ubuntu and probably anything Debian-like.
I don’t currently release packages built for Ubuntu etc, but I can if there’s interest.
Or you can build your own fairly trivially, something like this:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential debhelper librtlsdr-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev pkg-config tcl8.5-dev autoconf
$ git clone https://github.com/mutability/dump1090 -b v1.10.3010.14mu-12 # HEAD might be a bit unstable right now
$ git clone https://github.com/mutability/tcllauncher -b debian-package
$ git clone https://github.com/mutability/piaware -b debian-package
$ cd dump1090 && dpkg-buildpackage -b
$ cd tcllauncher && dpkg-buildpackage -b
$ cd piaware && dpkg-buildpackage -b
I needed to free up a RPi, So i installed piaware and dump1090 on my Netbook running Xubuntu. So far been running good none stop.
You could run it on a VMware guest running Debian / Ubuntu - you may have to build from source (not a big deal), just make sure that the VMware you are using will present a physical USB port as a virtual USB port on the guest system.
(I like Oracle Virtualbox - and its free 
)
So is ESXi, which is what I am running with about 8 VMs. 