[Xastir] Tigermaps not working?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Rick Green wrote:

>    Yes.  I left the machine running, and late last night, maps started to
> appear.  First a partial map, then a map every few cycles.  When I got up
> this morning, there's a nice map populated by stations on the display...

Their server gets very slow sometimes.  Every once in a while it
stops working at all.


> I did discover that I had to change the TRANSPARENCY value in USRadar.geo
> from white to black so that I could overlay it on the tigermaps
> effectively.

Known problem.  I believe it has to do with the color depth of your
system.  I think Tom checked in a fix for this quite recently, so it
should work on 16/24/32 bit systems now?  He also reported that the
8-bit display code was broken (non-existent?) with respect to this.


> Since I took the lazy path and installed from the .deb package, I'm stuck
> with what the maintainer gives me.  The last time I tried compiling
> something on a debian-based system, I ended up hosing the whole system.  I
> need to learn how to create a .deb package from the receent sources so I
> can be closer to the bleeding edge, and still compatible with apt.

Well, I have a similar problem with respect to RPM files.  What I
choose to do is keep a few packages entirely separate from the
RPM/YaST system.  Those packages I install from sources.  I keep
them in the /usr/local/* tree as well, which keeps them separate
from the files installed by the OS.

At the moment I also have to keep YaST from updating TIFF, as I had
to downgrade it one revision to get my geoTIFF stuff working.  Every
time I run YaST it wants to update them.  Next time I update the OS
I won't have that problem anymore as the latest-latest TIFF versions
should be ok.


> Is there a HOWTO or script buried somewhere in the tree to help with this
> task?

> I would still need to recompile, since the .deb came with dbfawk
> but not rtree support builtin.

RTREE just speeds things up, it's not required.  DBFAWK makes things
configurable/prettier, it's also optional.  If you have dbfawk
support, that means you have Shapefile support, so you're good to
go.

Go to the "Map Pointers" link on the Xastir homepage, then to the
"2003 & 2004 U.S. Tiger/Line streetmap data in Shapefile Format"
link.  Download what you need.  Go for the 2004 files instead of the
2003 ones.  Put them somewhere in our /usr/local/share/xastir/maps/
heirarchy (feel free to make subdirectories there at will), reindex,
and Xastir's Map Chooser should then be able to find them.

Speaking of that, anyone care to process some newer Tiger/Line data
so we can get an updated map set?  It takes a lot of space and
processor power to process the entire U.S.  I think it was Derrick
that automated this process and did the conversion a couple of times
before.  Perhaps he can do it again or help someone else (Gerry?) to
automate the process.  It'd be great if it could be kicked off on
TAMU's servers to process it and leave it on the TAMU ftp site.
Even better if it was so automated we could kick it off whenever a
new set of Tiger/Line data came out (twice a year now?).

--
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!"