[Xastir] Xastir virtual machine now available for download

[Tom Russo]

On Sun, Dec 24, 2006 at 02:50:06PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jewen at shaw.ca> flavor, containing:
> 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.

Bleah.  That's annoying.  I'll see if I can figure it out this week.  I usually
don't have a windows machine running xastir (I've wiped the hard drive
on my windows laptop and installed linux on it, with windows running
in a virtual machine for the occasional video game), but I've got one
set up now running the virtual machine.  Restarting the virtual machine's
networking might be as easy as following the instructions that 
vmware-config-tools.pl outputs at the end of its run.  But I am not sure
of that.

> >> 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.

Great!

> 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.

I'm glad to hear that.  Hope everyone has that experience now that it's the
default.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick