I use an ext2 filesystem mounted on /media/mmc2 to store maps on my mmc card.
It's 1KB block size wastes less space than FAT32's 4KB and much less than FAT16's 32KB cluster size (for my 800MB partition).

There's also a 128MB FAAT32 partition (for mmc1) and a 64MB swap partition on my 1GB card.

In addition to ext2, you can format FAT32 with 512-byte blocks (or any other power of 2 that is 512 or greater) using the -S option of mkfs.vfat. This allows you to share the benefits of small block sizes and direct Windows access.

Using small block sizes in general decreases the overhead to a sufficient level, in my opinion, especially if you filter out the 103-byte files (which I have considered doing directly in Maemo Mapper). The decision of whether to use the file system or a custom package format is really one of CPU vs. FileSystemSize efficiency. As the number of maps gets large, without caching all of the map offset locations (or wasting ridiculous amounts of file system bytes by keeping the index symmetrical), accessing a single map becomes a processor-intensive operation, even when using a quadtree-based index structure. And updating the database becomes much more difficult (which is why you suggested it as an "offline access" mechanism).

GPSDrive combines the worst of both worlds. It uses a file that specifies the file system locations of all available maps, which means that first it has to read in that list, then it keeps that list in memory and does an ugly linear search to find the "nearest, most appropriate" map given a particular lat/lon/zoom. This is fine on a desktop machine, but with limited CPU and memory it doesn't work. Moving to a determinate file system directory hierarchy removed all of that processor and memory overhead, in exchange for a little file system overhead.

gnuite,

I just want to say thank you-
your app is really killer.
For hiking cross country, navigating road trips, or just tracking for fun,
your app tracks my GPS unit, downloads the maps off my tethered phone,
and just basically WORKS!!

I too am colorblind, so I am also looking forward to being able to change the color of the progress and route lines.

Also, I read somewhere that you included a chime to go off at waypoint markers, in lieu of the flite voice. It looks like flite is in progress...
Was that chime only in the v2.0 for os2005?
(I have OS2006 and love it!!)


Thanks again, you're a genius :D

DCarter

There is no "v2.0 for os2005", at least not of Maemo Mapper. For Maemo Mapper, v0.x runs on the 2005 OS, whereas v1.x runs on the 2006 OS.

The chime is available only in Maemo Mapper v1.0.2, which runs on the 2006 OS.

oops- I get it now!

The application installer says my version of Maemo Mapper is v1.0.2, but perhaps it is not, because I cannot for the life of me find where to select chime on or off...

I bet if I uninstall it and reinstall it will be there!!

Anyhow, my sincerest gratitude; do you take donations on your site?

Thanks,

DCarter

It's not an option - the chime occurs regardless, and it happens when you approach a waypoint. It happens at the same moment as the flite announcement would be made, which depends on the "Advance Notice" setting.

Donations are accepted at the Maemo Mapper website by clicking on the "Make a Donation" button. Thanks! :)

Just a short note to those wondering that downloading maps doesn't work sometimes: Google is now showing captchas if they suspect automated map downloads :-(

How did you discover this? I googled for "google maps captcha", but I didn't find anything interesting.

Wasn't working today so I tried to open a topo tile in the browser and got the captcha. They seem to send it as a 403 error. Ican email the HTML if you need it. Any automated downloading tool would need to pause, open the URL in a browser and wait for the user to solve it.

Jens.

gnuite, I do have some more comments on the file system vs. map archive storage, but I guess dicussing this only make sense if "user" acceptance is on your list. With "user" I refer to the Joe Average user - not a linux developer - i.e. somebody who his not familiar with file systems or manually mounting ext2 partitions.

Jens.