beginners guidance

General talk
1

How can you use the maps of openstreetmap without an internet connection???
I have 1) desktop amd64 (3200+), 1GB ram ubuntu 8.04 hundreds GB disk, 2) ASUS eee 901, ubuntu 8.04, GPS Holux M1000 (and good old Etrex). The asus is meant for places where there is no internet, even not through my Nokia E61 (which by the way works great with the M1000 after some hacking).

I have long standing experience programming math models and stats in pascal and fortran and some in python on a variety of platforms.
BUT BUT BUT I cannot figure out how to handle OpenStreetmap:(:(:(:(. It seems to me that “how to” documentation is either lacking
or is directed to people who already know how it all works.

I succeeded in getting gpsd, gpsdrive and tangoGPS working on both systems. I could download the entire world, the Netherlands and a 1x1 degree section around my town. But I cannot view the offline osm files. Gosmore fails on everything I try e.g. segmentation fault suggesting to reduce MAX_NODES. Where can I find how???,

Please, please help me on step by guidance for somebody who doesn’t know how it works, where is it, where is documentation on all the perl scripts and how to use the applications in svn.openstreetmap.org??? I noticed by lots og google that behind wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php is much much more than the 8 items under “navigation”. How can I find out what there is more??? Only by googlechance???

My sincere apologies for being not bright enough to find out for myself and many thanks for guidance that can get me on track, first as a user and may be later as contributor.

Janwillem

2

First of all I’m not really sure what you want to do, I thought of three use cases for Openstreetmap offline; Edit, View and Use. Do you only want to view your data? Then if you use Ubuntu 8.04 I recommend you try to install Mapnik, Postgis 8.3 and osm2pgsql, with that you can render your own maps. There are guides for this on the wiki.

The Openstreetmap tools where built to edit maps on the net, it’s only recently that the coverage have become so good that you can use the data.

In what way does Gosmore fail, what are you doing? Have you tried using a smaller dataset?

3

I did some more trial and error and the problems seems indeed to be insufficient resources. So switching to a database model for rendering seems the solution. I’ll have a look at it. Ordered “Desktop GIS” hoping that that will contribute to my understanding of GIS. By the way, the Netherlands is quite good at OSM.
Thanks for the advise, Janwillem

4

You could also try QLandKarte GT. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/QLandkarte
It lets you view maps in Garmin format (img), and you can plot waypoints etc and transfer to the etrex.
So you need to get OSM maps in Garmin format. Instructions for that here, there’s a few ready made sets available: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin