After I post my message, I left the GPS device on and let the mapper stay at "Establishing GPS Fix" while maemo-bt-lugin was connected to GPS and MAC address was at 00:0B:etc and left home for about 6 hrs. At that time, the progress bar was totally blank. When I came back, I saw that mapper finally had the connection to the GPS. Then, I close the mapper and started again to see if it will talk to the GPS device and in less than 30 sec, it did. Then, I uninstalled the maemo-bt-plugin and restarted the 770 and clicked on the mapper and it did talked to the GPS device in a minute. And many closing and restating the application, it talked to the device each time. During all these test, I didn't change the MAC.

So, it is either a mistery or the mapper takes long time to make the initial talk with the device and once it does, it seems to be fine after that.

gnuite thanks for the reply and thanks again for this great application. BTW, would the ability to change the font size of announcements be available in the future releases? I sometimes finding it hard to read while driving in busy roads.

Thanks!

You ARE doing this outside, right?
GPSs don't work indoors.

But that was the major feature added to Maemo Mapper v1.2... You don't _need_ the modded version of 1.1 anymore...

P.S. Maemo Mapper v1.3 is coming soon with integrated support for WMS map sources. It also uses a new download mechanism that proves to work much better with terraserver (and downloading in general - no more random missing tiles).

The regular version now sports the toggeling between sat and street maps also, so from that point of view you may as well update to the latest version.


PS
And about that: so when can we expect altitude info in the saved track?

PS 2
hmm, seems I took long to reply - so my message was overtaken by the one from John...

gnuite, will 1.3 do revolving urls (kh0, kh1, kh2, kh3 for google sat images)? I don't know, but I suspect exclusive use of one to be related to why it quits working sometimes.

Any plans to release a desktop version of maemo mapper? How difficult would it be to have just a gtk version? I'm thinking about a laptop for the bigger screen. I could even mount my memory card in my laptop and use the same map cache. Nokia is working on making maemo screen size independant so maybe this will be easier in the future.

Not sure about maemo and gnome-vfs, but on my linux machine, doing a wget on kh0 resolves to one of three different IP addresses, so it's already automatically "revolving" around different IPs.

No, the real reason why it sometimes fails to work is because gnome-vfs's asynchronous download functionality sucks. That's why the next version of Maemo Mapper is going to use libcurl3 instead - it appears to be much more reliable, _especially_ with terraserver and other slower servers.

I hope to release that version this week (weekend at the latest), and it will also include altitude in the track data.

My opinion on this matter is that GPSDrive is sufficient for desktop use. I never intended to try to replace GPSDrive in any capacity other than on the Nokia 770. In fact, Maemo Mapper's code is highly optimized for the Nokia 770 and its screen, so major code changes would be required to get it to run on a machine with a higher resolution.

The only downside to GPSDrive is that (I think) it uses 1280x1024-sized tiles, and the filenames are in a particular format (different from Maemo Mapper's), so it can't use the same map cache as Maemo Mapper (which uses 256x256 tiles). I don't see this as a huge issue, though, since the Nokia 770 and a laptop have vastly different storage capacities, so you would probably want to have different caches anyway.

It's certainly possible to port Maemo Mapper to the desktop, but I would probably never consider integrating it into the current codeline, instead forking it into a separate project, at which point it starts turning into GPSDrive. It would probably be easier to just patch GPSDrive to work with Maemo Mapper's tiles.

The Final Solution
 

Hi Guys
I fall into the category of elder person who is a technophile, I love gadgets, maps and GPS gizmos. I envy all you lucky people out there who have Maemo Mapper up and running because I am struggling. Initially I was unable to point the Application Manager to the Maemo Extras repository because it wouldn't refresh the list with that link made. Remove the link and it is fine. I installed GPE as recommended by gnuite to obtain SqlLite. I downloaded Mapper 1.2.4 files and installed the application via File Manager and Application Manager.

Opening Mapper, with a blank black screen, I rummaged around the menus and set the map repository to my 1GB MMC and the URI to www.maps.google.co.uk/maps. Opening UK GoogleMaps I navigated to my home area of Hull in the north of England and enabled autodownload maps. I found folders in my map repository named "15" "16" etc but nothing displayed on the Mapper screen. I found .jpg files in some of the folders but was unable to open them with the 770 or my PC.

I contacted gnuite directly and he explained some of the requirements for maps and pointed me to /www.avraam.org/winmapper which on the face of it would solve my problem. This produced folders like CDQRG5QJ containing files like mt[1 to whatever number].png on my PC. These files opened to show neat map tiles of Hull. Great says I and transferred then to my map repository to no avail.

I see from the forum that I am not alone with having problems and hope that someone will be able to set me on the right track.


Success

At last I have joined the ranks of Mapper Fans, it's working fine.

I uninstalled Mapper which I had upgraded and upgraded then installed the latest version 1.3.5. I set the URI to one identified by the trick of right clicking on the white space in Google Maps, as recommended. Using the identified URI with w=2.29 and x,y and zoom set to %d I was confronted with a "Downloading Maps" message and then a screen full of a map of the world. Zoomimg around and playing with the map settings got me down to street level almost anywhere in the civilized world and in reasonable quality to some of the minor South Atlantic islands.

Thanks for all the info you guys have published on these forums

Is that the exact URL format you're using? Because that isn't going to work. It should look like something with three "%d" strings in it. Search the forums (or this thread) for examples.