[Xastir] Maps

[Paul Burton]

On Oct 22, 2013 10:14 AM, "Michael Gregory" <michael.gregory at verizon.net>
wrote:

>   I went to the xastir wiki and got directions for building from a
tarball. I searched for the latest "stable release, and found version
2.0.4. I executed the instructions from the wiki by copying and pasting the
terminal commands from the wiki to my terminal. FAIL!!!!
>
>   The instructions are classic linux instructions, worthless frustrating
and a waste of time and effort.

I recently built xastir 2.0.4 from source using the documentation included
with the source and the wiki and once I got all the dependencies sorted, it
worked brilliantly.

> The mint package installed version, (2.0.0), works flawlessly as soon as
the user figures out that the information on the wiki about putting map
files in ~/xastir/map_cache is totally bogus. By placing my maps in
usr/share/xastir/maps they become available in the  map chooser drop down
and can be used just fine so long as they are of a limited set of vector
graphics.

The fact that your distro's package is doing things differently makes me
wonder what else it's doing. Perhaps it's not installing the all the
dependencies (or the correct versions). Did you follow the advice you
received to look at xastir's About window to see what libraries are
installed?

> It remains to be seen whether raster graphics will work because they
require no only the raster graphics, (.png, .gif, .tif, .jpg…) files, but
an accompanying text file with reference information so that the xastir app
or its sub components can parse the placement of objects on the graphic
background. I am having considerable difficulty finding raster files that
come with the associated text file and have come to the conclusion that I
am going to have to create them my self. Not difficult just not easy
either. It seems that repositories of this kid of data are scarce.

When I had everything properly configured, maps "just worked." There was no
need to locate or create the descriptor files. Again, I believe they were
installed during the standard "make install" process. Are you trying to
download and cache the maps yourself so that xastir can find them, or allow
xastir to do it "on the fly?"

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Burton, N4LWW
paulburton0 at gmail.com