[Xastir] Xastir on the Raspberry Pi

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 08:25:33PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kg4pid at yahoo.com> flavor, containing:
> ?
> I installed Xastir on my Raspberry Pi using "sudo apt-get install xastir". Help-About shows Version 2.0.0 Compiled Jul 29 2012.
> ?While I'm not sure what the latest version is, looking back through the archives I did see mention of version 2.0.2 released a
> ?year ago. 

Current released version is 2.0.4 and the version reported by the current
HEAD of our CVS repository is 2.0.5.

The 2.0.0 stable release happened around October 2010.  The stable release of
2.0.2 happened about a year ago, and 2.0.4 was released about a month
later, with some bug fixes.

So the version in that repository was built from nearly two-year-old code,
just a few months before a new stable release, and not updated since.

> Why doesn't apt-get install the latest version? 

Because all binary packages for any linux distro are created by some volunteer
or other who decides to create the package and maintain it.  In the case of
Xastir, it appears that almost all of the folks who have done so are not
even Xastir users --- they don't follow Xastir development, and don't update
the package when we release new versions.  The Xastir developers do not 
maintain these packages (it is a lot of work to support binary packages for
the huge number of distros that want them, and it's hard enough finding time
to work on code).

It's why most Xastir users here advocate building from source right out of
the CVS repository.  It's a bit of work to get set up to do it, and the
instructions are system dependent, but once you're set up you can update
to the latest version within minutes of a commit (not that there are a lot
of commits these days).

> I was hoping to be able to see the wearther watches / warnings but in
> ?the archives there was talk of having to get the latest version for this to work, and having to regularly do this because the
> ?NWS keeps changing things or something to that effect. 

Yep, the NWS updates their shapefiles fairly often, and work is required to
get Xastir to read them..

But you don't *really* have to update your NWS shapefiles as often as they
release new ones --- the old ones will generally still work well enough.  The 
changes tend to be fairly minor (county boundaries, for example,
don't change often).  What NWS *DOES* change often is the *STRUCTURE* of their
shapefiles, and using the new shapefiles requires that Xastir be updated to
support the new structure (while maintaining support for the old structure,
too, so that old files still work).

I honestly dont' update my NWS shapefiles more often than every few years.  NWS
creates new ones every 6 months or so.  

> Are their any instructions for someone like myself that will get the
> ?latest version and get everything up and running? 

Check the Xastir wiki at www.xastir.org under Installation Notes.  There are
lots of notes on how to build Xastir for lots of different systems.

There is not a special installation note for Raspberry Pi, but really, the
plethora of installation notes can be summarized by the general pattern, 
and one of the more recent Ubuntu notes is probably close to right for
the Pi:

   -- uninstall the binary build you already have, and correct the configuration
      files in your .xastir/config directory to deal with the fact that
      the binary install and the source install go to different directories.
   --  get a set of compilation tools installed (apt-get install 
           build-essential for Ubuntu and Debian systems)
   -- Install a boatload of libraries that Xastir uses
          (try looking at a recent Ubuntu install note and find packages that
           have the same name, modulo a version number)
   -- download Xastir code from CVS
   -- run the "bootstrap.sh" script
   -- configure and build Xastir
   -- install your newly build Xastir

There's also a fairly good document called "README.CVS" in the Xastir 
distribution, which you can browse on sourceforge, or which may already be 
installed by your package.  This package won't give tons of system-specific
information, but has a lot of info about the process in general.

I'm not responding to the rest of your questions only because others will
have better, more complete, and probably less wordy responses to that part.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 echo "prpv_a'rfg_cnf_har_cvcr" | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | tr [a-m][n-z] [n-z][a-m]