Biergartler

An update (primarily to give the thread a bump): I've updated to Open SuSE 11.3 Teal (from 10.3) for a while now. Prost!

Other than open-source products, such as GPSBabel (which, despite Robert's indications of frustration, still seems to have excellent support for Linux; I suppose it's all relative), what products have good Linux support?

If you have two tar files, say, a.tar and b.tar, you can concatenate them using the "-A" command line option: tar -Af a.tar b.tar This will append the files (and their meta-information) in b.tar to the archive a.tar. You may want to work on a copy: cp a.tar new.tar tar -Af new.tar b.tar You can list the contents of an archive produced by tar using the "-t" command line option: tar -tf new.tar Not exactly. tar (from "tape archive") is a program to collect several files into one, while keeping track of owners, groups, permissions, subdirectories, creation times, etc. Compression is another layer, though some versions of tar can pipe files through compression utilities like bzip.

It's also limited, of course, by what's in the GPX file. The GPX files generated by PQs do contain most of what's on the cache page.

I paid $20 US for a Globaltop mouse with the MKT chipset (about the same sensitivity and accuracy as the SIRF Star-III). I connect this to an old Ibook that was rescued from the recycle pile. I've installed Macports, GPS Drive and all its dependencies, and a bunch of free maps rendered from the Open Street Map data. I've written some scripts to average the position, translate waypoint data and append them to the database, etc. It is indeed paperless. This is a prototype for a netbook/tablet based solution I hope to develop someday. But I have found more caches with this than with my Etrex Summit. Perhaps you wanted something a bit more integrated and turnkey in its operation? But it is the cheapest I have found (at least in terms of money).

Not sure which plug in you're referring to. If it's a binary, and was compiled only for Power PC processors, you may need to install something (apparently an emulator) called "Rosetta". In its zeal to shrink the disk footprint of 10.6, Apple has removed some utilities and extensions it deemed less popular. It should be on your Snow Leopard install set; do a custom install to add software and search for/select "Rosetta." Don't ask me where; I've only got PowerPC (and Moto) Macs, so I can't give you more specific information. Good luck, + Prost!

Which is why I'd like to see dual frequency capability to handle the new L2C signals. They're supposed to be turning on the CNAV this year or next.

I've seen a few errors in a Navit map built from Open Street Map data that didn't appear to be in the OSM data. Like gaps in roads. It may be caused by different segments of the same road being represented with different polylines, and might not show up when the OSM data are viewed directly, but get separated during conversion to Navit's format. Just speculation, though. BTW, yes, I'm the same Biergartler at the Navit wiki. Prost!

Navit can do routing because it uses vector maps. The map files tend to be more compact, too, and you can zoom in as much as you wish and still have a crisp display. GPSDrive (and Tangogps, I think) use pixel-mapped maps: lots of files, at least for GPSDrive, to cover a given area. And no real capability to route. Which is both good (because it's in an "off road" mode when you're off road) and bad (because it's still in a off-road mode even when you're on-road). I haven't compiled Navit yet for the Darwin notebook; have you tried the "T&H" display in conjunction with turning off the "lock to road" rule? An annoying thing about the maps for GPSDrive is the coordinate system. It assumes true North is perfectly vertical, while the map servers it uses (all servers of pixel-mapped maps that I have found, in fact) provide UTM or UTM-like coordinates. Not a problem near the middle of a UTM zone, but if your longitude is close to a multiple of 6 degrees and you're not in the tropics the grid North is off enough to result in significant errors in the position GPSDrive displays for you on the map, depending on how far you are from the center of the map. Apparently, GPSDrive was initially developed in Hamburg, approximately 10 degrees E longitude, in the central third of UTM zone 32. So this may have not been a problem for the original developers. I'm not sure if this is a gpsd issue, an issue peculiar to your GPSr, or is an artifact of how different navigation apps decide whether or not you're moving. Have you examined the GPRMC sentences and the output from gpsd? Your GPSr should provide velocity and track angle estimates and report them in GPRMC sentences. The navigation program may either use this velocity/direction information, or compute its own from a cache of recent position history. I don't know if gpsd also computes its own take on velocity and direction, but I'd tend to suspect one of the other two players. Prost!

That's not what the forum title says.

Cool beans! I've experimented with a setup very much like this: a GTop mouse (MTK chip, Silicon Labs 210X USB to UART bridge) on a laptop running GPSDrive. I'm still experimenting with the mouse, as I said, and have to date gone out twice. First time was with a Satellite 15" laptop running OpenSuse 10.3. (Had 11.1 installed on it for two days, then the keyboard stopped working; regression to 10.3 was not easy.) That was a bit awkward. Second time was with an old G3 iBook running Darwin 8. That was a bit handier. But I'll bet I looked geekier than you, especially with the Rx taped to the top of my hat.... :-b The build of GPSDrive I used on OpenSuse 10.3 had speech support compiled in. Not sure if it was Festival, Flite, or something else. Every few seconds it gave me one of a rotating series of updates: "Destination is ahead and to your left," "Destination is 30 meters ahead," "The time is now 20 hours and 11 minutes," etc. I know I've compiled Navit with speech support, too, but haven't field-tested it. Haven't done much with Tango yet, though your comment tells me I should. Although they're not designed for this purpose, maybe Tango or Navit will say something helpful for cacheseeking? Prost!

Again, let me start by thanking you for your effort. Understood. If I understand correctly, you have assigned yourself the task of producing a source package that's portable enough to be built reasonably easily on a lot of platforms, maintaining that source package, and upgrading it. That sounds like a lot to me. I don't think the "maintenance" portion of it includes having to figure out why some binary package built by someone unknown to you and not connected with your project crashes when run by someone else on a system using the same release of the same distro. Let alone another release or a different distro altogether. Even if it seems as simple as "needs libblahblah version >= 0.0.1" (addressing this issue often leads to another, then another, ...). Bugs me, too. I hope you don't resent, per se, the distribution of your software. I imagine it's the rest of what does (and doesn't) happen, starting with a build on the target platform using libraries not typically found on (that release of) that platform, including both arcane and bleeding-edge stuff. I'm saddened if you get a ration of crap because of this. And not always knowing what documentation was installed or where is a problem. A little shell script tells me what files are in an installed package (and where they are), including docs. I wonder how many people check this. Or do they go to the web first and get docs that pertain to a new major release? I'd be sorry if you got grief because of this, too. I wasn't, as I said in my previous post. What is "TOT?" Pardon my ignorance.... I think I feel your aggravation. I haven't made any binaries available of any of the software (perhaps a dozen or two projects in the past few years) I've built from source because I don't yet know how to do it correctly, and am reluctant cause more trouble than good. I realize I'm not being part of the solution, but I'm trying to not add to the problem.... Again, thank you. Know that people care. Prost!

Openstreetmaps currently incorporates all the Census TIGER map data, and is updated by a community similar to Wikipedia. There are tools to convert their open data to Garmin IMG files; someone has already done the conversion for you. The following link: http://touren.mospace.de/kachel.html will take you to a page that allows you to select a rectangular area. If you find the map interface for this awkward, you can simply enter, in decimal degrees, the longitude and latitude of the SW and NE corners of the region. It will return with links to downloadable links to the compressed IMG files. Because there may be a lot of them, a link to a shell script is also provided. Uploading them to your GPSr is up to you. Disclaimer: I do use Openstreetmaps, and have, at times, edited them, though I receive no monetary gain for this. I do use Openstreetmap-based data in conjunction with a navigation system, though it is not a Garmin. My Garmin receiver is pre-maps. You can get maps for many populated parts of the world. They are updated regularly, and free.

60 seconds in one minute. Divide the seconds by 60 to obtain a decimal fraction. This is the fractional part of the minutes. Prost!

First of all, let me start by saying "Thank You" to you, the GPSBabel team, and all other who provide open source solutions. Not unreasonable for you to drop binary packages. What would be a major blow would be if the source was only available for something like MS Visual Studio or something else very platform-specific (I don't think you'd do this) or an arcane development environment. Having sources prepared for autotools (or jam, in a few cases) has been extremely helpful to me. Another gps-centric project (a completely different project from GPSBabel) has migrated development from the GNU/autotools environment to cmake, and I have not yet been able to get a successful build of any version under the new development environment. I know you cannot possibly build binaries for every (currently under support) release of every distro out there. And even then there are dependency issues that can be difficult to resolve. Having an RPM for one specific release of one distro is less important to me than being able to build on a popular programmers' workbench. If I knew more about packaging software, I'd probably leverage my effort and provide the binaries for the distros I run.

My opinion is that giving a hint is entirely at the discretion of whomever is being asked for a hint. If the CO wants to give a hint when asked, that's their right. If they refuse to do so, that's their choice as well. If you advise folks a priori of a policy, so much the better, as long as you stick to it. If someone asks a previous finder for a hint, I suppose it's up to the previous finder. I've been asked on a couple of puzzle caches I've found. I try to not spoil things completely, and respond with an eyedropper. One time when I replied to a request with, "How far have you gotten?", I received no reply. Perhaps they were just fishing. I though it a reasonable question to ask.

"Windows" is a generic term for an integral part of the Graphical User Interface (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing Device). So although I use Linux exclusively, I also use windows. (When asked which windows I use, I reply "X11/R6." I run Kubuntu Dapper LTS (one desktop I can't update right now) and OpenSuSE 10.3 (one desktop and one laptop). I use Rick Richardson's scriptable (and script-based) geo-* suite. BTW, is there a tutorial anywhere on connecting GPSrs to a GNU/Linux host? I currently have an old Garmin Etrex Summit, but am looking around for something newer (perhaps with USB?) Thanks for the poll. Hope I'm not too late in replying.