Notices

Navit is more then beta quality, at least from what I have experienced with the N810 so far. Navit is very stable and does not crash, the routing although not perfect is more then useful. The refresh speed of redrawing the maps is more then sufficient.

What there are some issues that hold it back a little at this time though. At this moment there is not a way to get english units displayed. If you are using OpenStreets Maps there is no support for house numbers (an issue with OSM and not Navit). Zooming out quite a ways will not necessarily show a nice world map but rather a bunch of dis-jointed lines. To modify most settings you have to edit the navit.xml file (can be difficult on the tablets). Finally routing can be somewhat flaky at times but note that this is usually because of the quality of OSM maps and not necessarily an issue with Navit.

I would say that the biggest roadblock can be getting Navit installed and setup correctly. I use the SVN builds and update almost daily. So far all of the builds have been more then stable for use in the wild. I would actually recommend using the SVN builds instead of waiting for a "release".

The wiki page for the tablets is being worked on every week. There is now a lot of good content that should be simple for most people to follow to get things running. Hopefully with the addition of the example navit.xml file that you can download can use it will also be simpler to have Navit work for the tablet right out of the box.

I did read all that good progress of this app and had enough curiosity to install it, and got it working... (I can see map and my position on the map, but I haven't tried the routing features yet.)

Just one question: Is there a way to force the display stay lit when moving/driving?

I just added that section to the wiki as well. Although some patches have been proposed to accomplish this I believe there is a hold up on implementing them at this time. I believe gerritv has better knowledge of what the reason is.

In the mean time, it is best to change your display settings to stay lit while charging and to purchase a small car adapter to charge the tablet while in the car. You should probably do this anyway since the GPS tends to drain the batteries a lot quicker than normal.

Note that some car adapters might be able to provide enough juice to run the tablet but not necessarily enought to charge the battery. If you are purchasing a charger make sure you purchase one that is able to provide the same amount of power as the wall charger that comes with the tablet. Since Nokia used one of their standard power jacks it is possible to by a car adapter for a cell phone that doesn't have enough power to charge the battery (don't ask how I found this one out...). The tablet will think it's being charged and thus the display will stay lit but it will take a VERY long time to charge the battery or it might not charge at all.

Adamis, that's what I'm talking about. It's got enough show stoppers or feature issues to keep it from being properly classified as beta. At the very least a menuing system for configuring settings needs to be added before I could consider it ready for any kind of "beta" classification, even if the system itself is nearly there quality wise. UI functionality AND configurability is part of the whole package, not a separate element to be gotten whenever someone feels like it.

As for a charger like what you're talking about, there is a trickle charger of sorts for the NIT, but I forget where I saw it.

You found that out too? I too made the same mistake buying too small car charger and noticed it wasn't enough to keep the tablet alive with GPS and display running! Since then I purchased the original Nokia DC-4 (I think?) charger and no problems since. Sometimes saving a buck or two isn't really worth it...

Is there a link to the bug/patches? I added the feature of keeping the backlight on to XChat recently and I haven't experienced any problems.

Just curious, is all.

qwerty12: This is the link to the bug tracker, I'm afraid there isn't a detailed explanation of why the submitted patches were only partially applied.

http://trac.navit-project.org/ticket/282

Lord Raiden: I agree that not having a gui for changing settings can be quite detracting for people, especially those that are not used to the command line. In my experience though, once Navit is setup there is little to no reason to be modifying the config file. I haven't made any changes for a couple of weeks now and it's doubtful I will make some anytime soon.

With the example navit.xml and navitOSD.xml files posted on the wiki (http://wiki.navit-project.org/index....t_on_n770/n800) it is now possible for someone to install Navit, copy the two files to their home directory, add map files to /media/mmc1/map directory and be good to go.

It's not perfect but for my uses it is much more useful then Maemo Mapper which is very good in it's own right but will always be limited by it's map support.

Adamis: Good points. I just tend to think from a UI perspective, as well as "newb friendly" since I work with so many. And you'd be surprised how many will run from a manual config setup if they don't have some kind of gui to walk them through the process. So my thoughts were more in that direction. I for one could care less, as I've been doing manual config hacking since the CLI *WAS* the UI and changes were done via VI. However, I'm not complaining about this on my behalf. I'm looking at things in the larger picture, and thus focusing on what others will need if this is to have any chance of becoming mainstream, which I think it should.

Hi!
I had tested edited navit.xml file and a downloaded bin maps from Planet Extraction. But the Navit either do not had started, or started without map (the map list in the menue was not present).
To avoid the sh*t access violation by saving the changed navit.xml i have changed the access permissions for this file to 777. Not the right way, i know! (ssh root@localhost -> root passwd -> chmod 777 /path/navit.xml). Because with the changed (and later original file too!) navit.xml i had no map access ...
... so i had removed the Navit application under App.manager and installed it again. But after new installation i still do not have the map!!! The loaded default test map is in the map list in the Navit menue now, but even if i select it or not, nothing changes! Now the Navit starts always with empty yellow surface only, all icons are present, the map is selected in the list - but no map will be realy loaded!
I have 3 times removed and again installed Navit directly from internet install like before, but i cannot see the default test map!

What is wrong please?
Thank you,
Feri

ferika: I'm not sure I follow exactly what the issue you are having is. The Navit.xml file that is on the wiki is not set to use the sample map. It is set to look for a map file in "/media/mmc1/map". Place whatever map file you have in that location.

Note that if you are using map data for just your state or country Navit will not have data to draw a world map from. You would need a world map from OSM to do that but note that performance can take a hit and it comes in at 2+GB.

Now... When you start Navit for the first time it doesn't know where it is and where it should center the map. If you are using the sample navit.xml file the default position that Navit is going to go to will be Las Vegas Nevada. If you don't have map data then you will be staring at a beige screen.

IF your map file is indeed loaded correctly then you can either wait for a GPS signal lock at which point Navit should center to your location and you should see your map data. This assumes that the map file you are using has data for the location you are getting a GPS position.

The other option is to do a search for a city known to be within the map data you are using. This is spelled out in the wiki page so refer to it if you don't know how to do it already.

I hope that puts you on the right track.