[Xastir] Maps

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2013, Michael Gregory 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.

You do understand that most of the 400 or 500 users on this list run Linux, right?

It helps to understand that Xastir's install needs to figure out the capabilities that are installed on the OS and morph accordingly into something that takes advantage of whatever is there.  The usual install on a fresh Linux box is to iterate through the "./configure" stage again and again, installing packages that Xastir can take advantage of, until the summary screen at the end is satisfactory.  It helps for people to write down the names of packages for their particular OS or flavor of OS while they're doing it, then put it up on the Wiki for the next sucker, I mean user, to try the install.  So the instructions get faster and more tuned for each flavor as people update the Wiki.

We've spent a great amount of time getting the install to be flexible enough to handle the thousands of differences among the various OS'es.  It's not an easy problem.

Then:  You're comparing the source install to a package install.  Two different animals.  The Xastir project doesn't do ANY packages, as there would be far too many for us to keep up with and we'd never get to work on source code.  It's up to individual users that have an interest in a particular OS to do the packaging and releases of same.


> 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. 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.

You haven't mentioned what sort of raster graphics you're interested in yet.  I would recommend using the OSM maps as a first step, which are vector maps from the OpenStreetMaps project.  Xastir can use OSM maps directly w/o having to download them manually onto your hard drive, but if you want local maps for driving or portable use, download the Cloudmade OSM Shapefile Extracts instead.

Once you have that working well, there are other OSM maps that are raster tiles.  There are USGS DRG geoTIFF maps (one of my favorites) for topo maps.  There are USGS DOQQ aerial maps.  Just let us know what you're interested in and I'll bet someone on here can point you to them.

Starting to get a feel for how this community works?  It takes a few hours or days to spin people up to help you, but they're out there!

-- 
Curt, WE7U.        http://wetnet.net/~we7u
APRS Client Capabilities:  http://wetnet.net/~we7u/aprs_capabilities.html