Notices

it depends on how many maps do you need? maybe you're downloading too much. too much of detail of areas you don't need. just start with your state download every other zoom level above 6 or 8 and see how long it takes. or do you have a slow connection? which maps are you downloading? (i think google stopped serving me satellite maps after awhile)

Hi,

strange things are happening...

Installed MM 2.3, tried to download several map levels, too much, MM stalled. Restarted N810. Tried again - downloading one map level at a time.

MM crashed and keeps crashing since at every start of the application. Even after removing the .maemo-mapper directory and reinstalling MM.

Where on the system can I look for logfiles telling me what happens when MM crashes?

EDIT

Well, found out what to do!

Somehow the crash(es) of Maemo Mapper left the internal mmc2 disk in a readonly state. So I first copied all data (except the Maps folder) to mmc1, then seacrhed the forum, found this:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...13&postcount=6
which made it possible to disable the swap on mmc2, after that I could format mmc2 via the file manager.

Copied back all the files and now, Maemo mapper starts again - still have to test downloading maps, though...

Franko30

Hi,

First, many THANKS to all and GNUITE for such a great app.

I see that "heading" is displayed only when we open GPS info in left side.. but it hides some portion of map. I dont want to see GPS info all the time but HEADING info is very nice.

Can we see / display transparent dial for heading information ? May be on the top right / left corner.

Regards.

I just started using N800 with MM and GPS.
I tried openstreet and google maps both, on same route.
Google maps are much more precise then openstreet maps.

Are we not allowed to use Google maps in maemo mapper ? is it really illegal.
Please confirm folks. I can live with open street but google maps are so much better.

If they are not legal, then why do get we them from the repositories ? Just curious.

When I drive with N800 + Mapper + GPS, I want to see a map moving towards my the direction in which I am going. i.e. the blue dot should always move upwards.

Is it possible ?

I have tried auto center options -- lead and lat/lon but it just keeps the dot in center. The map moves anywhere but not upwards (or downwards, I should say).

Any clue ?

I don't know to be honest. I suspect that out of ignorance I am doing serious overkill. I've got a decent cable connection feeding the wifi router but am only up to 3/4 on the "processing maps" dialog. Not sure if it is updating *everything* to all levels above 2 or just the area I am currently observing.

I have been going for a "full set of maps" with the idea of seeing what the advantages were for each. I think that perhaps the VE set and topo might be the wiser choice and just keep my GPSMAP76CS for serious work.

I had picked three areas that I am at least vaguely familiar with. Seattle area north to Canada, Chicago area, Atlanta area and Jacksonville FL area to the coast and south to St.Augustine. I think :-) :-/.

The more I learn, the less I seem to know :-/.

Cool, what you want is to rotate the map to GPS direction. That's in the settings.

I got it. Many thanks.. I still need answers/help for my other questions...
i.e.
- how to display heading without gps info panel ?
- How safe (legal point of view) is to use google maps ?

No idea about the heading question, but yes, it's legal to use Google maps. If they let you download them, then you can use them however you want once they're on your device. You can't use them commercially, but this isn't commercial, you're not making money and neither is gnuite. I wouldn't worry about it.

MM2 is really slow compared with MM1, but it's doing the real time download and display, so we can't blame it too much. It's a challenging job and no GPS device can do it today. From the source code I go through, seems that there are still places to improve.

MM2 uses gdbm database to save the card space and make the interface simple, the drawback is that gdbm is not that efficient. Every time you fetch a key or data, it allocates memory twice - read from the file and make a copy then give it to you, user has to free the memory - this approach is not necessary in this application. I delete that in my windows gdbm library, since MS runtime simply refuses to free the memory and crashes. Redundant memory allocation of gdbm is a slow factor.

Hash value calculation is quite consuming in gdbm, which depends on the key length. The MM2 uses 12 byte key, it seems too long, there is no difficult to condense it to 8 byte length, it can save some time.

The most important, there is basically no cache management in gdbm, every time you fetch a key or data, it goes into reading file. It really slow you down. So implementing cache management is definitely a good way to smooth things up. From my point of view, it may be improved if we have a SW architecture like

GUI <--> cache management <--> downloading/file read/save

The three should be in separate threads.

GUI is to do map display and responding user input.

GUI talks to cache management, which should manage a pool of map tiles in ram, a few levels of surround area at least. Downloading and file reading should be transparent to it. It's up to the cache manager to decide where to get map files.

The download routine shouldn't save the downloaded map tiles right away as it does now, it should download map tiles into the memory and turn them over to cache manager. Cache manager decides when to save them - only at the time when GUI is idle and no user input, or cache pool is too big - which is unlikely since the device has 60m ram.

The best way to speed up the app is to avoid the three doing intensive jobs all together at the same time, so when GUI is busy the SW doesn't do saving, when downloading GUI should be told to wait, the central piece should be the cache manager.