Monday, February 25, 2008

maemo-mapper and google

So I've been using maemo-mapper to record tracks when we've been showshoeing and cross-country skiing the last couple of weekends. I was hoping I'd be able to do something fun with them eventually. Tonight, I finally sat down to see what I could do. I installed google earth (which, the Linux version seems to have a memory leak or something because it starts out running ok, but gets slower and slower till its unusable and I have to kill it), and tried just opening the track file from mapper. No such luck, it seemed to just silently fail. A couple google's later, and I found gpsbabel, a  nice little app that can speak many forms of gps. Low and behold, it's even in ubuntus repos! So, apt-get install gpsbabel and then "gpsbabel -i gpx -f trackfile -o kml -F kmlfile". Bam. Now I opened the kml file with google earth and there was my track. Thanks for your help, open source!

On a related note, I had been using a crappy workaround to get maemo-mapper to work with the internal bt on the n810. I had been starting the built in map software, which started the gps, then starting mapper and leaving the other map running. I read on the maemo-mapper forum that with the newest version, you can just set it to the bluetooth gps setting and leave it blank, restart it, and it will work. Sure enough, now I can use it without starting the other gps. Which is nice. Nice. 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Not mine (N810)with latest OS, when I select btconn and leave the Mac address blank, MM refuses to enable the GPS, saying one is not installed!