A GPS is one of those toys that I have wanted for a very long time. So last year I finally marshalled enough excuses in one place, lined them up and plunked down some money for a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx in the vague belief that there's enough Linux software out there which understands GPS, and the Garmin is a brand that seems to have mature Linux support. And besides, I'd been told it was a good model that would do what I wanted and then some.

Once I got it I naturally wanted to do stuff with it, and in particular I wanted to connect it up to my laptop which (of course) is running Linux and I found that it wasn't nearly as trivial as I had thought.

This prompted me to run around finding software to use with it, so here's my capsule review of my journey from "extremely naive" to "very naive". Perhaps I'll also learn something from the comments of people who are further down the track.

My first resort was "apt-cache search gps", of course, which immediately brings up such fine sounding programs as "gpsman", described as "A GPS manager" (I haven't managed to get it to do anything yet), "gpstrans" which since it specifically mentions Garmin GPS sounded like just the ticket (it appears to be quite old and superseded). There was some useful stuff as well.

Getting Maps on the GPS

Since the Garmin GPSMap series will display maps, I wanted to be able to get some mapping data on there. There are two map sources I was interested in:

• Map data from NZ Open GPS Maps which gives comprehensive coverage of New Zealand, and is free and community maintained, albeit with some annoying uncertainties about the licensing of the data, and it's being tied to Garmin GPSs.
• Map data from OpenStreetMap.org which gives excellent coverage of many areas of the world, and is free for use under a creative commons license.

Using the NZ Open GPS Maps

The NZ Open GPS Maps are built specifically for the Garmin GPS, so getting them onto my GPS was relatively simple once I found out the exact command line was remarkably hard.

The program that I needed to find to be able to get the maps onto my GPS was sendmap20 which is a free (as in beer) download from the cGPSMapper Website.

I downloaded the maps from the NZ Open GPS Maps hosted on the cGPSMapper site. I needed the files identified as 'binary' files - the installer is a Windows program and no use on Linux. They all have filenames like 64000012.img.

The command-line I first used to install the maps onto the GPS was:

sendmap20 -t/dev/ttyUSB0 640000??.img


That works fine, but if you have even a moderately sized micro SD card in the GPS there are much faster ways. As I found more free maps I found much better ways to do it.

An alternative approach

In the GPS (well, in my one anyway) there is a micro-SD card which is FAT formatted and all of the installed maps are in one humungous combined image of all of the uploaded maps. This means that there is no way to straightforwardly add/remove maps without creating that image, and re-uploading the whole thing. The image file is called 'gmapsupp.img' and is in the 'garmin' subdirectory on the SD card.

This means that you can create the file (or even several different files, with different maps on them) and move them directly on there much quicker, either by taking the SD card out and using it in a USB2 reader (for really big files) or switching the GPS to operate in USB Storage mode (which is USB1, but OK for smaller files).

You can create the IMG file to copy in as gmapsupp.img with sendmap20 also, with a command-line like:

sendmap20 -lNZOpenGPSMaps.img 640000??.img

and then, if you mount the GPS as /media/GPS, you can copy that file on directly

cp NZOpenGPSMaps.img /media/GPS/garmin/gmapsupp.img


QLandKarte

Another program I found useful specifically for dealing with the Garmin GPS Map format is QLandKarte, which understands the native Garmin format and will display the maps in a graphical window.

You can also point and click to select maps, building up a specific set that you can then upload to the device from within QLandKarte itself. This seems to operate a lot faster than sendmap20, presumably because it's driving the USB directly, rather than through usb_serial. To get it to work I seem to have to (a) sudo rmmod garmin_gps and (b) sudo QLandKarte, however, which is definitely not ideal.

For the moment I will continue to use sendmap20 to create files which are sets of the maps I want, and will put them on the device in USB storage mode.

QLandKarte is still very useful, however, for looking at maps and deciding if they are worth bothering with. I used it in this way to select the Australian maps I took with me when I went to Linux.Conf.AU recently. There are more free Garmin GPS maps.

OpenStreetMap.org

Those Australian maps came from OpenStreetMap.org and ultimately I expect that it will become the best source of data for creating maps for my GPS. OpenStreetMap.org is an attempt to provide community-maintained maps for the whole world and which seems to have made significant progress in UK, Europe, America and Australia as well as many other parts of the world.

The data from OpenStreetMap.org does not have the same licensing restrictions as are present even in the NZ Open GPS Maps data (which is relatively free, but has problems similar to the old-style BSD license).

There are also some good mapping interfaces to the OpenStreetMap data although the searching currently still leaves something to be desired. Interfaces are also available for extracting subsets of the data, which is in a fairly straightforward XML format, or you can download the whole lot, but at nearly 3GB for the bzip2 compressed version you won't do it every day.

I gave a brief overview talk about OpenStreetMap.org while I was at Linux.Conf.AU and it seemed to go down quite well (I gave it several times, in fact). You don't need a GPS to contribute to the project, and of course the maps which are being created are usable for many purposes beyond their usefulness on GPS. Some people apparently even print them out, but that just seems weird!

LCA officially started today, with a great opening keynote by Bruce Schneier very nicely pointing out the differences between feeling secure and being secure, and with a few good examples of where these are mismatched and action needs to be taken to fix the mismatch. Good stuff - catch it on video if you get the chance.

Of course for me LCA started on Monday when I got roped into presenting a lightning talk at the Community Wireless miniconf on OpenStreetMap.org which is something I've been fiddling with recently, and a project which definitely deserves more attention. Since nobody else turned up to give their lightning talks my 3 minute presentation was stretched severely out of shape, but the Community Wireless miniconf was generally pretty interesting and I stayed there all day in the end.

Yesterday was the SysAdmin miniconf, and as one of the organisers there was no chance for me to look around at what else was going on. It was a full-on day, and the feedback I have from everyone is that it was a good miniconf. Certainly it was good enough to attract more people than could fit in the 120 seat theatre we initially had allocated so that we had to move into a much larger theatre. A big thank-you to the organisers for so quickly recognising and reshuffling things so that was possible.

All signs so far definitely indicate another great linux.conf.au

I'm at DebConf7 now, in Edinburgh, and it is great to catch up with the great bunch of geeks that is the Debian community once more. As well as working on general stuff through DebCamp (the week leading up to DebConf proper) I'm helping out in producing the video streams running the sound desk or one of the cameras. The streams are highly recommended, and you can find them on http://streams.video.debconf.org:8000/, though for the New Zealanders reading this they do, of course, happen at seriously silly times of the day. Here is the DebConf7 schedule if you want to watch :-(. We'll get the talks up in a downloadable format as soon as we can, and I'll point people at them again then.

Highlights of the conference so far have been a talk by Nick Mailer on Debian Day, which was a very nicely presented run-down on the ancient history of intellectual property laws here in the UK, and the very interactive session this evening on Maintaining Packages with Git, which had some very good tips from David Nusinow as well as a lot of support from the audience. I now better understand why Penny is so keen on "git rebase", though hopefully I would have figured that out if I worked on more shared projects.

It's great to see 150-odd people in the room, many of whom had some experience with Git, and there were some very heavy users with great insight into it's strengths and weaknesses. Contrast that with DebCon5 in Helsinki where I almost felt Martin Langhoff and I were unheard when we acclaimed it, or even at LCA in 2006, where Martin did a first pass at importing X.Org into Git. Of course Git itself has come a long way from then too.

Another very interesting session was Martin Krafft talking about 'netconf', which is his proposal for a replacement of the ifupdown infrastructure using a much more stateless, event driven approach. This definitely looks like a well considered design and I hope he can pull it off.

I've got my own talk on Thursday, so I'll be concentrating on pulling that together for the next few days. If as many people come as have said they will (50% of the people signed up for any talk at that time) then it will be a very stuffy BoF room. The venue here in Edinburgh is great, and it's nice to have a good network connection. Everything has been running very smoothly for the participants, as far as I can see, though I know plenty of people have been working very hard to make it so, behind the scenes.

Weirdly, after only a short time using IPv6 at home and at work, I am finding I miss not having it readily available IPv6. I unfortunately had to disable my tunnels because adding 350mS latency to everything makes the web very frustrating. Perhaps next year we'll be able to add IPv6 to the desired network features for DebConf8 in Mar del Plata. Good to see that in the meantime the availability of the new IPv6 nameservers for .nz has been announced in my absence though.

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it.

When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company.

So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work.

Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network.

So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card.

At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.

Flying home from Auckland the other day I discovered that women don't have noses. At least that was the case for the little representations on the safety sheet in the seat pocket in front of me. Wherever there was a little picture of a man, it would be a person with a nose. Where it was a picture of a woman there would be no nose.

Odd, and yet somehow it worked.

I shall now have to spend some time staring more closely at people's faces, so if you see me looking at you strangely over the next few days please don't get upset: I'm just trying to work out whether you have a big nose, and why a picture of a person without a nose should look more like a woman.

Last week I was flying down from Auckland to Wellington and when I checked in the lady at the counter said "I believe they are going to announce a delay on that flight due to the late arrival of the incoming aircraft".

Sure enough, 5 minutes later we were told our flight would be delayed "about 20 minutes".

I'm pretty suspicious about airline delay announcements. I don't know what school of optimism or psychology they send those people on, but it seems like they never want to tell us when the flight really is delayed until.

So I cranked up my laptop and connected to a free WLAN (curiously called "Mahara", but it was open enough for my VPN to start without me having to visit a web page or anything - nice). I browsed to the airline arrivals page and discovered that the plane we were due to travel on was due to arrive 45 minutes late.

Sure enough, 20 minutes later we were informed that the plane would be 45 minutes late, and it was.

Why do airlines do this? Is there some psychological study somewhere that says that you should break this bad news 20 minutes at a time, because I sure think I would rather just know the whole lot up front. Do they somehow think that the collective belief of the passengers will cause the incoming jet to be 50% more efficient, and be able to fly the 1 hour route in only 40 minutes?

Fortunately nowadays we can use information sources on the internet to work out the truth before it is announced. I know that when I was flying to Sydney for LCA I flummoxed one of the attendants by telling her when the flight would actually be departing only a few minutes before she announced it to everyone.

I guess it gives me something to do while I wait...

Here at LCA it seems that some people want shared calendars, so I'm pleaased to be able to tell people that I have spent the last 9 months thinking about and writing a CalDAV server.

While it isn't finished yet (is software ever finished?), it does work just fine with all of the free CalDAV clients that are available, and a number of nice people have translated it into six languages so far.

So if you are at LCA and want to know more catch me at tonight's penguin dinner.

Puck has pinched the laptop I normally use for conferences so yesterday I had to lug my mammoth laptop around all day just so I could deliver my presentation from it. In the event the projector didn't work for me so I had to borrow Holger's instead. So I am now laboriously typing this all out on my Nokia 770...

Yesterday the conference started and I mainly followed the Debian stream, which is where my own short talk was. Keith Packard gave a fun overview of where X development is going and also showed some of the fancy stuff in action, including seamlessly expanding the desktop when he plugged in the projector. I'm certainly looking forward to that, and I hope I can get to meet Dave Airlie while I'm here and find out whether the open ATI drivers will be keeping up with that as well.

This morning Chris Blizzard gave a keynote talk about the one laptop per child project, and he's up now talking about Fedora, which I know far too little about, so it is quite interesting.

We had some fun yesterday afternoon when my son ran up and told me “Daddy there is a grownup over there using a kids computer!” prompting a flash crowd around the guys from Oregon State University who had an actual OLPC laptop and it was great to see it in action. That sunlight readable screen is awesome, and I really want to see one on my callphone, and my internet tablet, and (of course) my laptop. It would also be nice to see that mesh networking more readily available.

This morning I first heard about the Sidux distribution too, which I will definitely be looking into further.

No links on this post at the moment because it's kind of hard to do that stuff right without having a real keyboard and mouse attached. Feel free to add some in some comments, and I'll come back and add some more links later too.

Well the incoming plane managed to land and we checked in and await departure ...

Whew!

So we should get to Sydney late afternoon :-)

I am sitting in foggy Wellington Airport, using the new free wifi, which is a blessing because the plane cannot leave due to it's not being here in the first place.

I was informed of this by a text message at 1:14am this morning - or at least informed that the plane would be delayed by an hour (now long past) - unfortunately too late to really react. Currently they are suggesting the delay will be three hours, on the assumption that a plane will be able to land at 8:00am. The fog outside is still thick though and it's now 7:15 with no sign of the sun.

Oh well, Sydney by lunchtime I expect, and at least we have convivial company with a few other Catalyst people who are also off to LCA before the main bunch leave tomorrow.