[Xastir] Xastir virtual machine now available for download

[James Ewen]

On 12/24/06, Tom Russo <russo at bogodyn.org> wrote:

> > I've managed to have it die more than a couple times.
>
> What dies?  The whole virtual machine?  Xastir?

Just the instance of Xastir that is running. There's no terminal
window to have a look at to see what error might have happened. I've
managed to lose access to the ethernet pass through as well. Making
changes on the Windows side kills the connection, and I have not
figured out how to refresh the connection from within the VMWare
appliance.

> > I also can't seem to get it to use shapefiles.
>
> Check file permissions.

Bingo! I forgot about file permissions! That was indeed the root of my problems.

I have added a small section to the Wiki under Adding Maps in the
VMWare: How-to reminding people of this fact.

This is the first I have made use of the rtree function, and indeed it
appears to do a very good job of speeding up the processing of
shapefiles. My road .shp file is 42 MB in size, and the associated
.dbf file is 504 MB in size, yet Xastir can render a map in only a few
seconds.

Before rtree, I cut the file into Maidenhead gridsquare chunks. This
allowed Xastir to only process tiles within the viewing area. rtree
appears to work faster on the huge single file.

Now I have to define the dbfawk file for the Canadian shapefiles once
again. I did this once before, but never got things looking decent
before the file got eaten by a hard disk failure. Perhaps this time I
will save a copy offsite...

Seasons Greetings to all!

James
VE6SRV