[Xastir] Tigermaps not working?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Rick Green wrote:

> Pardon me if this is an old issue.  I see that there was some mention in
> July of the tigermap servers being slow.  Is that still the case?

Just tried it (4-something in the morning here) and it was quite
fast.


>    I have a newly-built workstation in the shack, running Xubuntu 6.06.  I
> installed xastir 1.7.1 from the Universe repository, and configured an
> internet interface.
>    For some reason, I can't get the online tigermaps to display.  I enabled
> them for zoom levels < 800, but all I get is a message 'Loading
> Online/Tigermap.geo' for a minute or so, but no map data appears.  I tried
> extending the timeout value to two  minutes, but that doesn't help.
>    I enabled USRadar.geo in a layer above the tigermap, and I do get that
> data displayed.

Ok.  That means ImageMagick is able to display at least some types
of images.  Doesn't mean it is working for GIF files, which is what
the Tigermap server is currently returning.  Check in your
~/.xastir/tmp directory to see if a map was downloaded.  If you
didn't install libcurl, you might be using "wget" to fetch the map,
and some versions of wget are buggy as well.  Check "wget" by
manually invoking it on a URL to see if it works.

Are you getting any error messages on the Xterm that you started
Xastir from?  If you're not running Xastir from an Xterm or similar,
do so while you're debugging this as Xastir will put some error
messages out to STDERR.


>    In the past, I've seen cases where tigermaps were available, but would
> occasionally timeout, and I would get a blank screen after zooming.  Is
> there some way to enable caching og the tigermap data, so that I can
> reduce the load on the server, and use the cached data instead?

Yes, but somewhat limited.  You need to install the Berkely DB
Library and development headers, then re-run configure/make/make
install.  Xastir will then cache the online maps, then re-use them
as long as the URL is _exactly_ the same as a previous request.  To
make best use of this feature you need to use the same window size,
same zoom levels, same map center.  Best in that case is to set a
bookmark and then zoom/pan with the keyboard keys instead of the
mouse, so that you get cache hits often.

Or... Do what I do and start using the Tiger/Line data which has
been converted to Shapefiles locally, and configure in rtree and
dbfawk support.  You'll get maps very similar to the Tigermap
server, but not have to depend on the internet for them, and things
will be very fast.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: 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!"