[Angstrom-devel] [Familiar] Gpsdrive on iPAQ

[Dmitry Artamonow]

On 13:41 Mon 17 Dec     , Paul Sokolovsky wrote:
> Hello Andrew,
> 
> Sunday, December 16, 2007, 5:45:13 PM, you wrote:
> 
> > Even though gpsdrive has been written with a PDA mode in mind there
> > are a number of problems with it that I found annoying.  This was
> > mainly due to the fact that it is slow on iPAQs due to the amount of
> > floating point maths that it performs.  The user interface also
> > doesn't really fit on to the screen well with the status tab in
> > particular being unreadable in places.  The program also contains a
> > large amount of options which don't make sense on a PDA.
> 
> > Eventually these problems became too much for me so I tackled the
> > gpsdrive source code and removed or fixed what I saw as the problems
> > with the PDA mode as well as adding some new features.  The program
> > now uses a lot less CPU time (far fewer floating point operations),
> > consumes less memory (executable size is halved) and is easier to use
> > (GUI spread across more tabs).  (Since I made these changes a new
> > version of gpsdrive has been released.  I have not tried this in PDA
> > mode, but it doesn't claim to solve any of these problems.)
> 
> > Since this is a GPL program and other people may also want to try out
> > my improvements I have made them available at the address below.
> > There is original source code, modified source code and a familiar
> > ipkg compiled with Familiar 0.8.4 on my 3800 series iPAQ.
> 
> > http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/gpsdrive-ipaq/
>
[ skip ]
> 
>   That said, I cross-post this to a more active distro's list and to
> people I know working on mapping solutions, maybe they will be able to
> make some use of your work.
>

After looking at screenshots I realised that this program is something 
I longed for. Sadly, there was only ipk for Familiar-0.8.4 (that old
distro with OABI and non-working keys on h2200) on project homepage. 
So I started fiddling with OE and bitbake for making this beast compile 
for Ångström, and after a lot of tries finally made my first ever working 
bitbake recipe. It may be not very good, as I'm still learning, but it 
WorksForMe(tm). It runs fine on my h2200, though I not tested it in 
real life yet :)

I submitted recipe and needed patch to OE bugzilla:
http://bugs.openembedded.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3679

Hope it will be useful for someone.

--
Best regards,
Dmitry 'MAD' Artamonow