The XO Computer for Navigation

[phiggins]

Scotte,

Yes I noticed there were a few other programs similiar to Wine out there. I'm new at all this Linux stuff but I'm amazed at the armies of people out there working on it that I see when I do searches.

The XO only has a 1G flash drive so your program may not fit well. Maybe if it had a USB drive attached it may work.

I'm just glad that Wine worked. It was quite large about 23Meg but I'm still only using 1/2 of the flash drive.

For those of you who want to see how much your using and are not Linux familiar, enter: df

Paul

[agkirk]

Paul, Big THANKS from this end for your excellent work on getting Mariner on the XO and setting up the GPS input. Other help from the forum got the maps installed and all seems to work. Just to complete the life cycle for SW, how does one remove the installed activity? It appears the installation put the Navgator Mariner binary permanently on the XO.

I did notice that once Mariner is running I can not use the alt-tab sequence to toggle between activities, any comment? The Mariner Exit works.

Thanks again for the well written instructions and the Linux hints, all were very useful.

[phiggins]

agkirk,

You are probably running into the same problem as I have ie; when you open a chart Mariner throws an Exception. Once that happens a lot of things don't work properly including tabbing to another activity and when you exit if you say Yes to saving the configuration, it never ends.

If you press the Home button (Round one with dot) it should show you all the activities and if you mouse over the Mariner one it shhould give you a drop down that lets you Stop it. If not the only alternative is to Reboot.

I've reported the problem to Navgator folks.

You should try wine and SeaClear. Seems to work a lot better.

Paul

PS: and SeaClear and Wine are free

[phiggins]

Thinking back to my trip to the Caribbean a few years ago, we had two laptops on board one being a backup for the other. The things we used the computer for were:
- Navigation software - ran Fugawi ENC
- Tide Tables - ran WXTide32
- Email - had a Globalstar phone and used XGate
- Internet - once in a blue moon I got through on Globalstar
- Stars and planets - PocketStar

If I was going again (and I will) I would also use it for:
Skype - cheap calls if wireless internet is available
AIS - it would have been really nice to have when we half way to Mexico when we were surrounded by freighters and cruise ships.

Anything else people use their computer for on board?

So I want to see how much of this I can get working on the little XO computer or something similiar that draws very little current and is suppose to be very rugged. I would still bring along an my Windows XP laptop but it might be just the backup computer.

So far I've found two navigation programs that work: Mariner (actually not working very well yet) and SeaClear under Wine which seems to work very well. I would have preferred to have Fugawi ENC as I've used it for years but can't get to work under Wine.

The tide program was only really needed on the cruise a few times but at those times it was realy nice to have. As I said we used WXTide32. I knew there was Linux version called XTide of this so I thought this would be easy to get going on the XO so I did a:
yum install xtide
and it found it but the download was the biggest yet 47Meg. Yum eventually ran out of memory and terminated early. I knew I had seen somewhere that mentioned how to get more memory for yum to run and finally I found it. You have to turn off the windows part of Linux by issuing:
su
init 3

This puts you in console mode where you can then rerun yum with more memory available. After the download you have to enter: reboot

So now yum worked and I had Xtide installed but when I ran it it got:

"Xtide Fatal Error: CANT_LOAD_FONT
A font required by XTide does not appear to be on the system."

Unfortunately it didn't tell me which font. I did a lot of internet searches trying to find the missing font but finally gave up.

I decided to install the windows verion called WXTide32 and run it under Wine and surprise, surprise it works, ...well nearly. A couple of small things don't work but the program is still quite usable. Also it installed in a funny directory ProgA~1 rather than Program Files and I had to change the name of the harmonics file in the harmonics.idx.

If anyone wants all the details about installing WXTide32, let me know and I will post them or send you an email.

So I am having more luck running Windows programs under Wine than the programs that are suppose to run natively under Linux.

Paul

[scotte]

Originally Posted by phiggins

"Xtide Fatal Error: CANT_LOAD_FONT
A font required by XTide does not appear to be on the system."

If it helps, from the XTide README:

A: You need to install the Schumacher fonts.  These fonts were reliably
   present on every X11 installation until 2006, when Linux distributions
   started breaking fonts out into lots of separate packages in accordance
   with upstream advice.  For what it's worth, XTide 2.9 gives a more
   helpful error message that tells you which font it could not load.

Of course the bad news is you have to install yet more into your limited flash!

[Rez]

I think its wonderful the way all you experienced sailors are helping a third world child to make his way in naval electronics.

[phiggins]

Scotte,
Yes I found that reference to the Schumacher fonts too and did download them:

wget http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases...-1.0.0.tar.bz2

then decompressed them with bzip2.

but it still didn't work. Probably after downloading them there was something else I had to do to make the fonts active. I tried the fc-cache -f command but it said it only loaded one font from the file I had put the Schumacher fonts in (/home/olpc/.fonts) . The fonts are in .bdf format.

Did you get and install them? If so, from where from and how did you get them to work?

Paul

[scotte]

I'm in a different distribution of Linux that handles installs a different way (ubuntu, a debian variant), so I'm not entirely sure the right process for the XO, but I imagine they would be available via yum...

I did find a link for the manual process:

Linux.com :: Everything Linux and Open Source

It's a bit of a manual process - they have to be in the right place, they have to be cataloged in, and X needs to know where to find them. If you can do it via 'yum' it will resolve all that for you.

Hope it helps!

[phiggins]

Thanks Scottie. I followed the url and learned a lot about fonts but was still unable to get Xtide working. I found out the font its looking for is:
-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-100-100-100-c-70-iso8859-1
its not in the system but there is an alias for it pointing to another font and it is in /usr/share/X11/fonts/misc along with all the Schumacher fonts. Read something in the olpc documentation about the XO computer only using builtin fixed fonts. If I issue a xlsfonts:

-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--0-0-75-75-c-0-iso8859-1
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-100-100-100-c-60-iso8859-1
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
6x13
cursor
fixed

Tried changing the alias for the missing font to one of these but no luck. Think I'll give up on fit or now.

I bought a book called Linux for Dummies and it has a free DVD with Fedora code 2. I have a spare computer that I'm going to try and install it on and see what a real Linux system looks like.

Is that Ubuntu free? Can I download it? How do you pronouce that anyway?

Paul

[Jackstee]

And I thought it was a sailing Forum

Steve

[phiggins]

Sorry Steve,

This is some of things the sailors who are on the hard for the winter do to kill time until spring.

Wish I was where you are.

Paul

[scotte]

Sorry I couldn't help on the font issue , you've done what I can think of without actually working on it myself. OK, back to sailing...

[Beausoleil]

Originally Posted by phiggins

I bought a book called Linux for Dummies and it has a free DVD with Fedora code 2. I have a spare computer that I'm going to try and install it on and see what a real Linux system looks like.

Is that Ubuntu free? Can I download it? How do you pronouce that anyway?

Fedora Core 2 is ancient - Fedora 8 is the current version. You can download it and Ubuntu for free. "Ubuntu" is pronounced roughly as "ooboontoo", but the "oo"s aren't quite as long as a normal long "o" sound. FWIW

[phiggins]

Thanks I had already decided to try Ubuntu on both my spare PC and the XO computer. The Version 7 wouldn't work on the PC, screen just flashed so I got the V6 and it works but can't get the wireless to work.

Had much better results on the XO. I installed Ubuntu V7 on a SD card and booted from it. But still have the same problems with Xtide and Mariner. If you are a masochist try it:

OLPC News Forum: Installing Ubuntu using compressed files

At least the window system is more like what we are use to on our Windows PCs.

paul

[Beausoleil]

Originally Posted by phiggins

But still have the same problems with Xtide and Mariner.

Paul,

I haven't tried it yet, but JTides may do the trick. It's a java app, rather than X-Windows. XTide itself is a bit long in the tooth.

You shouldn't have to worry about X fonts with it.