Hi
I’m a newbie - only contributed to OSM for the last 3 months - and this is my first post.
Is it just me, or is it getting much harder lately to get up to date UK map downloads for Garmin?
When I first got involved back in June, there was an updated UK gmapsupp.img file on the /OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download page about every 2 weeks. But the latest one there now is dated 30 July, 2 months old.
In August, a new page by user Jclark2906 appeared, promising an updated .img download “most weeks”. Only 2 files have ever appeared, dated 9/8/2008 and 17/8/2008.
So I’ve tried to brew my own. In the past I’ve successfully downloaded UK extracts from planet.osm from nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/downloads/planet/ and used mkgmap to create a .img file. But when I try this with the latest uk-080924.osm file, mkgmap just hangs. I have a modest 512MB Win XP PC, BTW.
Maybe uk-080924.osm is corrupt in some way?
Or alternatively I read on the OSM_Map_On_Garmin page that mkgmap won’t process arbitrarily large input files. The documentation unhelpfully doesn’t say how large such arbitrarily large files are, nor does it describe the symptoms of giving it one that’s too big. So I can’t be sure that this is the cause of my problem either. But I am suspicious that this might be the case, and it might explain why the other .img files have stopped appearing, if the folks who generate them are using the mkgmap route too.
If the UK extract has now got too big for mkgmap, are there any plans to fix mkgmap? I found one wishlist for the prog somewhere (can’t find it again) which I don’t recall made any mention of this as a todo. Or split the extracts into 2 files?
There are 2 workarounds suggested. One is to use osmcut, but this is only available as a .c which needs to be compiled and built, and I don’t have the appropriate resources to do this. (There is a java version which is deprecated on the grounds that it doesn’t work and isn’t maintained; I tried anyway, without success, but the only help I could find for the thing was in German and so I probably didn’t understand it too well).
The other workaround is to download tiles and combine them using sendmap20. I’ve done this in the past successfully too. But although tiles updates are promised to be weekly, they weren’t updated last week (the latest files are dated 17-Sep-2008). Hopefully this was just a one-off blip, but if this data source is going to dry up too, then it would seem there is no viable route any longer to get UK map data onto Garmin.