Notices

Wow that was fast. At this moment the update icon is no longer clickable for Georgia on my device, so I'd call that a success. (What's cool is that I haven't even closed Marble, merely been downloading other maps. Nice to see it checks update availability at times other than just start-up. )

I'll see if I can get at least one submission with a female voice to you guys soon.

New "bug" report - I can't install both Georgia the state and Georgia the country MoNav maps at once. I know it probably didn't seem likely that someone would want to have maps of everything, but I'm odd like that. Plus, it's always hypothetically possible someone using the N900's version of Marble (or more likely, Marble for some successor), would need both maps. Anyway, just wanted to report that.

A female speaker for voice guidance would be very welcome, thanks!

I just updated the asian Georgia map on the server. When you give the installation another try (the american state doesn't need a reinstall, only the asian country), both should work at the same time now.

Yep. Georgie-the-country installed alongside Gerogia-the-state just fine now. Thank you!

Marble 1.2 RC 1 (1.1.90) is now available in extras-devel for testing.

Changes compared to Marble 1.1.1:

Features:

• Bookmark Manager (available from the main menu)
• Offline Address Search (available from the Go To.. dialog from the main menu)
• Sharp texture maps
• Tracks can be loaded directly in the Tracking dialog
• Fullscreen mode (available from the map context menu)
• Voice guidance improvements

Performance:

• Texture map rendering is noticable faster
• Opening of very large routes is much faster
• Placemark rendering is faster
• Routing, more specifically guidance mode, is much faster for very large routes
• Guidance mode now uses lazy recentering to save some battery power

Known Issues:

• The N900's main volume settings are ignored in voice guidance. This seems to be a bug in phonon.
• ogg-support from extras-testing and extras-devel breaks voice guidance. Try to avoid that version if possible. If you experience this problem (no playback of voice guidance commands despite a speaker installed and configured), please vote for this bug.

Note that you need to install (or upgrade) monav offline routing maps to get databases for offline address search.

Please report bugs in our bugtracker or here. Happy testing

A default english speaker for voice guidance -- the "Voice of Marble" -- will be included in the final packages. Please participate in the contest such that we can offer a wide variety of speakers for download. The speaker files will be released CC By-SA 3.0. We'll offer them not only in Marble's format, but also in TomTom format for usage on such devices. Other applications could also easily use the files.

Alright, so as the resdient only-person-who'd-ever-think-it's-a-good-idea-to-install-offline-routing-maps-for-the-whole-world, I can confirm that cramming your N900 with hundreds of different routing maps isn't the most optimal thing to do for performance (more so than it probably has to be). Now, I haven't tested actual routing much yet (was very glad to see the new version in the Devel repos though, with offline address search as I understand it) but the more I've installed the more abysmally slow Marble's MoNav configure menu has gotten. (Marble itself is a bit more memory intensive now but isn't actually slow yet, at least for map display - I haven't tested routing in a while.)

Now, that's obviously logically sound - it has more files to check/verify for map updates, etc. However, it is insanely memory hog-ish - to the point where with Marble running by itself (not actively installing a map, just on the MoNav configuration menu, usually after having installed a new map), causes out-of-memory errors - I.E. you go to launch Conversations and it tells you there's not enough memory and you should close some applications (I've only ever had this happen when I turned swap off once), and doesn't launch conversations.

This leads me to believe that Marble/MoNav keeps more data than necessary cached at once when checking for updates and/or installing maps (the entire map list, with all the versions/relevant data?). Wouldn't it be possible to load part of the map list, check it against the server, keep in memory only the data for maps that need updating, and then free the memory of the rest of that part of the map list, then load the next part, etc?

I'm going to keep reporting my experiences here - while this isn't a common use-case, I think me installing every single MoNav routing map on my N900 would be useful for seeing how Marble handles that extreme of things.

I,m totally impressed by marble maps. The first time i've downloaded this application it was in a beta state and I thought what crap. It,s is slow like hell and there is nothing special on it. Yesterday i installed it again and I was really amazed what happend since the last time. It became a fantastic application and is now definitly the best map application on the N900. I would like to support you. But because i have no programming abilities the only way to do this is tol donate. Please tell me how to.

Hmmm, actually, I just went through an interesting experience: Yesterday I found two "blank" maps in my MoNav configuration list. They had the date set as 01/01. Pressing the delete button didn't delete them (the "Are you sure you want to delete this map" or whatever question box popped up, but that's it). I didn't mention it in the above post, because the general issue - increased slowness and the like happened before that, AND I wanted to see if I could dig up the source of the issue myself before bothering you (earthwings and the rest of Marble's devs).

So I did some digging in the Marble MoNav routing folders directory: /home/user/MyDocs/.local/share/marble/maps/earth/monav/...

Turned out some of my maps had missing pieces. Namely europe/russia had almost nothing in its directory (I had installed the Russia map from the Asia continent first, but there's no Russia map in the asia directory - the same is the case with Turkey - I presume you have only one map for Russia and Turkey on the server, and both Asia>Russia/Turkey and Europe>Russia/Turkey point to the same map?), and England and Scotland were missing the "marble.kml" file.

When I deleted the europe/scotland and europe/england directories, they two "blank" maps in the MoNav configuration list disappeared, so between that and the contents of marble.kml files in some of the other directories, I presume said file handles map .tar.gz archive name, and somehow that has to do with its displayed name and date-uploaded, as well as the "transport type" of a map (Motorcar and/or whatever other types will eventually be enabled). I also reinstalled the Russia map from Europe>Russia, which put all the files in the Russian map's directory that the other directories have - but I don't know if the initial Asia>Russia download just glitched, or if it actually has different data in that download.

At any rate, after I got rid of those two folders (Scotland + England), I actually got SOME increase in MoNav configuration list load speed. It's not as badly slow on initial open now - although the download and install speeds are still noticeably slower than they were when the amount of routing maps was a lot less. And there's still "not enough memory" complaints from the N900 when you try to launch something like Conversations (though it seems to be able to launch it when a new message comes in, so I THINK it's really the OS being overprotective.).

Actually, regarding Scotland/England - are those maps supposed to be there, or does the Great Britain map include everything that Scotland/England includes?

ya latest update to 1.1.9 gave me couple of headaches too. i had to clean install and install new offline maps for it to work properly. It might be due to some changes at marble maps server

Well, for me the latest update didn't require any updates of MoNav navigation maps. Might be because I've been downloading maps quasi-non-stop (I'm almost done. Just gotta finish off Oceania [I'm on the Ps] and then cap it off with Antarctica) for a few weeks now, when I get the time to do so, so it's possible my maps were already up to date.

(My N900-derived productivity nose-dived as a result this last week, as the slowness during install increased.)

This was before and independent of any specific Marble version, too.