[Xastir] Xastir to monitor a bicycle ride/race

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, William McKeehan wrote:

> In my mind, my ideal view of the race would multiple views:
> 1. an overview of the entire route showing the route, major milestones along
> the way and all APRS stations involved in the race.
> 2. A close-up view of the leader with some detailed street maps along with the
> route and major milestones
> 3. A close-up view of the trailer with some deailed street maps along with the
> route and major milestones
> 4. A close-up of a select stations (switched on demmand)
> 5. A list of stations, their distance/direction from some specified station
>
> Now, this is my first try at something like this. I don't see an easy way to
> do something like this with Xastir.

You can't do multiple views with a single Xastir instance.  Options
you do have though:

1) Create map bookmarks, which save the zoom level and center point.
You can then switch between multiple map views relatively quickly by
bringing up the appropriate bookmark.  Note that this does not
switch between map files though, but if you set various maps to only
show up between certain zoom levels, or use the more automatic "Map
Levels" toggle, then you can end up getting the detail you want from
your maps at the various zoom levels.

2) Create multiple users on your system and run Xastir once as each
user.  This will give you as many map views as you want, 'cuz you
can bring up more instances as you need them.  Just remember to
bring up one per user in each case.  You can now link them all
together if you have a "master" Xastir station that has a Server
Port enabled.  Just connect all the others to "localhost" port 2023.
The trick to letting Xwindows allow more than one user on the
machine to put open windows on the server is to type "xhost
localhost" as the original user that started up the Xwindows
display.  After that, the 2nd and succeeding Xastir users will be
able to start Xastir displays there too.  If you're running a window
manager that has paging (like kde or fvwm2), then you can switch
between Xastir displays with the click of a mouse, yet have each of
them full-screen if you wish.


> What maps did you use?

I'd suggest using Shapefile version of the Tigermap files.  See
README.MAPS for where to download them, and compile Shapelib, pcre,
and dbfawk into Xastir so that you can configure/use them properly.

--
Curt, WE7U			         http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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