The XO Computer for Navigation

[RBEmerson]

Bingo!!! Much as I want to like an app that works on either a Windows or *nix machine, Navgator is rapidly wearing out its welcome with moves like this and the business of not letting the host system resolve locks, etc. for serial ports on its own. It's enough to make me want to load up wine on my openSUSE machine and fire up SeaClear 2.

P.S. the problem with sound is a little nastier than one might expect. I was listening to streaming audio (using amarok) and when I exited from Navgator, it killed the audio from amarok, too. I had to kill and re-start it to get sound running again.

[agkirk]

Paul, The SD instructions were perfect. Thanks. Now I have to figure out why the raster chart I downloaded from NOAA doesn't show up when I browse for Charts in Mariner.
I know you were looking for info on the DC connector and below is a link to some discussions.

OLPC News Forum: 12 volt car/auto adapter for the XO

Thanks again!

Alan

[RBEmerson]

Getting Mariner to show charts is a three-step (at least!) process. First, you need to point a chart browser at the sub-directory with the charts (I got my charts directly from NOAA at LINK - the charts, when the ZIP file is expanded, are contained in BSB_ROOT so I looked in /usr/share/charts/BSB_ROOT/ ), and then you have to import them into Mariner. Once imported, you need to tell Mariner to display a chart, either by name or by position. Regrettably, none of this seems to be done "automagically".

[agkirk]

OK Lost again here... I pulled a BSBs chart from NOAA into a folder on the SD card and did gzip -cd thinking this would unzip it and leave the decompresed file in that folder. Not what happened. The NOAA file decompressed into a large number of piece and where they went I know not. Where does gzip put its output (so I can clean up my mess) and what command string should I have used?

[scotte]

Originally Posted by agkirk

OK Lost again here... I pulled a BSBs chart from NOAA into a folder on the SD card and did gzip -cd thinking this would unzip it and leave the decompresed file in that folder. Not what happened. The NOAA file decompressed into a large number of piece and where they went I know not. Where does gzip put its output (so I can clean up my mess) and what command string should I have used?

gzip will put it in cwd (current directory). You don't want the -c flag, which decompresses the file to stdout, instead of to a file, unless you are piping it to some other command that's expecting the output on stdin.

If the files are in zip format, you actually want to use the 'unzip' command, instead of 'gzip'. I know it's a bit confusing, but 'gzip' is actually not for operating on .zip files. I don't know if the distro on the XO has 'unzip', but that's what you need...

[scotte]

You know, seems like there's a huge market here for an actively developed cross-platform nav software that support both raster and vector charts. What the commercial products charge is pretty crazy considering map data (at least for the US) is available free - and the user interfaces are generally bad and cumbersome. A platform like this could be used standalone on a PC/laptop, or on a low-cost (compared to, say, an E120) embedded system.

As a software guy, this would be kind of a cool project. If anyone out there is a venture capitalist and wants to finance this, send me a PM.

[RBEmerson]

Yep, just do an unzip. The files come in the form
/BSB_ROOT/nnnnn/nnnnn.bsb
and
/BSB_ROOT/nnnnn/nnnnn_x.kap
(where nnnnn is a chart number and x is a chart component sequence number)

When unpacking, specify a destination sub-directory (e.g., /home/gandalf/charts - substitute your real home sub-directory for "gandalf" - unless that's the name you use, too...) and the charts will unpack there. Look in /home/gandalf/charts/BSB_ROOT/ and you'll see a sub-directory for each chart you've downloaded.

Note: you can extract the files and strip off the sub-directory information, to make one "flat" sub-directory filled with all the .bsb and .kap files. If you're trying SeaClear II, for example, this is required. You can not do this with ENC files! (well, you can do it, but expect to see a lot of overwrites and lost data...)

[Beausoleil]

Originally Posted by scotte

That is a bit strange considering Intel processors are little-endian, and while I have no idea if the XO uses an x86 architecture, it's pretty darn common!

The XO uses an AMD Geode processor. From Wikipedia:

Geode is a series of x86-compatible microprocessors and I/O companions produced by AMD targeted at the embedded computing market.


I guess the question is whether the Java virtual machine is big- or little-endian. I suspect it's a bug in a Java library used in the XO. I don't know if the XO uses the GNU implementation of Java or Sun's implementation of Java for Linux. Since Sun's SPARC architecture is big-endian, I can see the GNU version messing some things up...

[drewc]

Ok, finally (!) have the Navgator running on my XO system and am able to open charts (Maptech BSBs, not, unfortunately the free NOAA RNCs...Navgator still complains about those) but can't seem to master the "unique" navigation of Navgator. For example, every chart program I have ever used has a convention for panning a chart that is similar to "left mouse and drag" (even Nobeltec let's you do this if you select the "hand" control")..what is the corresponding UI for Navgator? Other programs have a "select area" technique that uses a similar "left mouse and drag" to outline a rectangle that represents an area that you'd like to zoom into or otherwise highlight...again, I can't seem to find this in the Navgator UI. I guess I have to agree with other posters that unless/until this author implements the "basics" of a competitive UI for such an application I will probably use my time more productively with other tools that are far less frustrating to learn and operate.

[RBEmerson]

It's unfortunate Navgator doesn't really play well with others because it certainly shows there is at least interest in a platform-independent nav program. So it goes...

[scotte]

The byte-sexing (I know, but that's what it's called) issue (i.e. little-endian) in this case has to do with the format of the sound file. I.e. the sound file itself is big- or little-endian, and it would seem the sound engine does not support the sound in question. I.e. the underlying hardware is irrelevant, the sound library just doesn't reorder the bytes (which is kinda silly, doing so is simple and well understood).

One thing would be to make sure you are using the latest SunJVM (1.6), but as you've already noted, missing sounds isn't the end of the world, sort of a benign Exception in this case. At any rate, this does seem to be a pretty common problem.

[EDIT: The install package looks to come with a redistributed Sun JRE 1.5, but it's probably not too hard to get it to use a different version - one of the great things about Linux+Java, that's easy to hack. 1.5 media support was pretty much half-baked... 1.6 is at least three-quarters-baked ]

[phiggins]

Still having a few problems with Mariner: The sound problem and whenever I open a chart it thows an Exception but goes ahead and loads the chart but after that things like saving the configuration don't work. Anyone else have this problem?

Anyway I decided I would try wine, the emulator program not the drink. It allows you run native Windows programs under Linux.
So I installed it: yum install wine

The first program I tried was Fugawi ENC. It had a lot of problems. It was able to see the GPS fine and I could load any of the built in charts like North America. But when I tried to load my raster charts from the SD it went through the process of importing them but when I tried to open them it went into a loop. Also it kept getting an ole error.

So I gave up on Fugawi and tried SeaClear and it works flawlessly. I didn't try AIS but at least the feature exists, it doesn't on Mariner.

What amazes me about using wine is how fast the programs run. Faster than they do on native Windows.

For both Fugawi and SeaClear before you start them you have to define the com port to use. See below.

To install Fugawi and SeaClear I downloaded their install files on my PC onto a memory stick and then put the stick in the XO. Be sure NOT to install or run wine as a super user (su) it must be under your normal uid: olpc.

To Install SeaClear:
wine /media/KINGSTON/sc_setup.exe
KINGSTON is the name of my SD card. Substitute yours.

Setupthe com port to use:
$ cd ~/.wine/dosdevices
ln -s /dev/ttyUSB0 com1

Start SeaClear:
wine "c:\Program Files\SeaClear\SeaClear_2.exe"

If you want to load maps:
wine "c:\Program Files\SeaClear\MapCal_2.exe"

Real neat.

Paul

[scotte]

That's great you had success with wine. It's definitely hit or miss. An option I've used with great success is VirtualBox. If you are familiar with VMWare, it's essentially the same thing only free (for non-commercial use) and a bit faster. If you aren't familiar, basically, VirtualBox is a virtualization product that lets you boot another O/S as a virtual computer. It does take a fair amount of system resources (lots of RAM since you are running two seperate O/S, and lots of disk for the virtual hard drive).

Getting USB and Serial to work right can be a bit dicey, but it's mature enough that it's pretty likely somebody else has had the same problem so the support forums work pretty well.

Just tossing it out there, back to the regularly scheduled thread.

[drewc]

Paul, thanks once again for your pioneering efforts with nav software on the XO. I have just successfully followed your steps to install and run the SeaClear app...very nice indeed. One thing that was always a bit odd, I think, with SeaClear is the separate chart installation app...did you copy first your KAPs into a .wine subdirectory and then use the "autofind" in Map_Cal to import them in? Would be appreciative of you sharing this last crucial step with MapCal and loading charts for us Linux-semi-literate folks who just want to get boating! Thanks.

[phiggins]

DreaC,
Yes had trouble with that too. Usually you can do that with the navigation program. Anyway here is how I did.

With SeaClear stopped start the MapCal_2. I have my .KAP files on my SD in a directory on my SD card so I then open Tools ... Set Directories

Then you will see a window titled Chart Directories. It should have the default directory: C:\Program Files\SeaClear\Charts. Press the little botton to the right <<. It will display directory tree. Click Desktop then the next directory with a / beside it. It will expand to show all the Linux directories. Go down and click the media one then the name of your SD card and in my case I have the charts in a subdirectory on the SD card called CDN Charts so I clicked it. If your charts in the top directory of the Sd card then just click that. Then press OK. This will take you back to the Chart Directories and you should see your SD directory in it. Just press OK.

Now Click Tools...AutoLoad List.. Scan for New Charts. It will then scan all the directories you specified and load any .KAP files found in them.

Then start SeaClear and click File ... Chart.. List All

It will produce a list that you can select from.

Not very clear but should work.

Paul