[Xastir] How do I use shapefile maps?

[John Dvoracek]

I am having a lot of issues trying to get xastir running under Fedora 9
on a Thinkpad where xastir ran fine under Fedora 7.  I'm also trying to
have this working by Saturday morning for an event.  I've given up on
getting online maps working since there seems to be some bug with those
as also experienced by others.  Instead I downloaded shapefile maps for
one Texas county, but xastir does not seem to recognize them.  Hopefully
I am just installing them incorrectly.  On startup xastir says it
supports shapefile maps:

[root at T23 ~]# xastir
Built-in map types:
      gnis   USGS GNIS Datapoints
       map   APRSdos Maps
       map   WinAPRS/MacAPRS/X-APRS Maps
       pdb   PocketAPRS Maps
Support for these additional map types has been compiled in: 
       geo   Image Map (ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick library, many formats
allowed)
       geo   URL (Internet maps via libcurl library)
       shp   ESRI Shapefile Maps (Shapelib library)
       tif   USGS DRG Geotiff Topographic Maps (libgeotiff/libproj)
       xpm   X Pixmap Maps (XPM library)
festival_client: connect to server failed
SayText: Couldn't open socket to Festival
Indexing maps...
Finished indexing maps
*** Reading WX Alert log files
*** Done with WX Alert log files

I downloaded the Texas county shapefile maps from Texas A&M as
referenced in the xastir map wiki, then extracted and installed the
county of interest in my map directory as shown in this recursive
directory listing:

[root at T23 maps]# ls -R
.:
GPS  Online  TX_Polygons  TX_Polylines  worldhi.map

./GPS:
placeholder

./Online:
CanadaTopo250k.geo  terraserver-reflectivity.geo  tigermap.geo
WMSRadar.geo
CanadaTopo50k.geo   terraserver-topo.geo          TXRadar.geo
terraserver.geo     terraserver-urban.geo         USRadar.geo

./TX_Polygons:
Bell_County.dbf  Bell_County.shp  Bell_County.shx

./TX_Polylines:
Bell_County.dbf  Bell_County.prj  Bell_County.shp  Bell_County.shx

TX_Polyogns and TXPolylines show up as directories in the map chooser
dialog, but none of the maps within those directories show up.  Do I
have to do something else to use shapefiles?  Thanks for any help at
this late moment.

73 -- John