[Xastir] Problems installing Xastir

[Curt Mills]

On Sat, 1 May 2004, KK6RW wrote:

> After a few tries updating Cygwin, I still had the same error. I then
> decided to try it all from scratch and now have Xastir compiled and running
> under Cygwin. One thing I noticed was a change in some of the files for
> Cygwin. There were files such as  xorg-x11-bin, etc this time downloading
> Cygwin. I also noticed a lot of the xfree86 - components were not downloaded
> as they were before. At any rate, the install went well and now running
> Xastir.

Be aware that the Cygwin versions on their site appear to be
unstable at times, and sometimes you just have to keep running
"setup.exe" and updating to their latest until it works right.  They
seem to change it often, which of course breaks things often.  Once
you have a working version of Cygwin, you might want to hold on to
that one for a while.  You can also downgrade to previous versions
of each package if you know which ones worked for you before.


> I'm working on maps now. I have a few local maps in the Ui-View format that
> I am going to try to convert. I use Ui-View with Precision Maps support but
> realize Xastir does not support PM but then there looks to be a lot more
> support for many different maps.

We don't support _any_ commercial map programs.  There are better
options out there.


> I've seen some references to Tiger maps and needing to compile Xastir with
> dbfawk. I can't seem to find the proper syntax to do this (I'm very new to
> *nix ways of doing things!) There sure is a lot of info in the archives
> here! It's very helpful.

You'll need the "pcre" and Shapelib libraries installed in order to
use it:

    cd src/xastir
    ./configure --with-dbfawk
    make
    make install
    chmod 4555 /usr/local/bin/xastir

Once you get it all compiled, the dbfawk files allow you to
recognize a "signature" in the Shapefile DBF files, and then you can
specify how you want that particular map drawn.  You can put the
dbfawk files into your /usr/local/share/xastir/config/ directory, in
which case you have to restart Xastir to have it read them, or you
can put them in with each map subdirectory where they are needed, in
which case they get read each time you load the map (I believe I got
that correct, Tom?).

We have a few dbfawk files in xastir/config/ directory already, and
Tom's site has some info on creating them.  See README.MAPS.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"