[Angstrom-devel] [Familiar] Gpsdrive on iPAQ

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello Dmitry,

Saturday, January 12, 2008, 8:46:35 PM, you wrote:

> 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.

  Good work. I'm still not sure what future has for it, but let people
enjoy it while it's fresh. I committed the recipe to .dev branch. It
needs a cleanup, but as it is a copy of gpsdrive_2.10pre2.bb, let it
be that way. One important thing is however package name. It cannot be
called "gpsdrive", as it's something different from the original
gpsdrive, nor it can use "2.10pre2-ipaq" version as that shadows real
gpsdrive version. So, it should be gpsdrive-ipaq_2.10pre2.bb, not
gpsdrive_2.10pre2-ipaq.bb. Finally, we should learn to call apps in
more generic and wide-community friendly manner, so it went to OE as
gpsdrive-pda (would be gpsdrive-qvga if there weren't too much
changes).

> --
> Best regards,
> Dmitry 'MAD' Artamonow


-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                            mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com