GPS Navigation Software

[noromamai]

Hi,

I am a Zaurus owner (SL-6000) since two weeks and was wondering if there is any GPS navigation software available for the Zaurus, commercial or free. I searched the net a bit and came up with some programs (no commercial ones), but they are not really what I was looking for. I am looking for something that will tell you directions while driving to a certain destination, soemthing like the Tom Tom Navigator software. Does anyone know whether this is available for the Zaurus?

Any help that will put me in the right direction is appreciated.

[mjalkut]

Ive been looking too.  Not so much for the direction giving as much as just a good moving map.  I 've found the stuff that will connect to the gps and some free/share stuff for putting up a map, but nothing as suffisticated as for other platforms.  And I have no end of difficulty trying to get good maps.  I would gladly pay for an integrated package that would provide maps and work right out of the box.

[lucho]

mjalkut,

You won't find such product for the simple reason that its potential users for the Z are less than a hundred. The companies that produce mapping applications for other PDAs are not interested. Independent developers cannot afford to license good map databases. I checked -- even if I create the software for free, with such a small user base, the cost for the end user would be hundreds of dollars (let me guess how many of you would buy it for that price :)

[Codefire]

I've been looking at the GPS situation too. It appears that you have two routes (sorry, bad pun) you can take for GPS mapping:

1) QpeGPS, very good program (you can get it at http://killefiz.de/zaurus/) , it seems though that it's very difficult to get/configure maps. That assuming you can get the maps in the first place.

2) Zroadmap/ZRoadmapGPS, also at http://killefiz.de/zaurus/
ZroadmapGPS is only mildly useful, gives you the GPS sat info
Zroadmap possibly the best way to go, right now. The maps are readily available (https://www.oesf.org/commu...tml?group_id=44) and it supports flite for speaking the street names and locations.

There is no software that currenlt does routes/directions that I know of.

Map collection forum:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=206322

P.S. Remember to get gpsd running correctly before running either app.

From Doug1955:
<truncated>
1. Install gpsd. (It is in the qpegps download site)
2. Insert card in cf slot
3. cardctl resume
4. gpsd -p /dev/ttyS3 -s 4800
5. run zroadmap or qpegps

[Zuber]

For what it's worth :

I just got an enquiry from a comany that is considering developing mapping software including voice navigation for the Zaurus.

Not sure how likely it is to lead to something as they are still evaluating...

But they already do stuff for other platforms, so at least they are not starting from scratch.

And the best bit if anything comes of it is the maps they do are for Europe. Yippy...

[Ling]

Are started to look this direction. I have a Garmin Etrex Legend that I connect via serial->serial/usb adapter->notebook running Garmin Mapsource. It would be great to get that functionality under Linux and even better to get it on the Zaurus. For me, I don't think that the Zaurus screen is large enough to be useful for me while driving, but it might be good to review/edit collected routes. If you have not gone in and edited a route (a long/complex one like from Kuwait City to Baghdad) on a small screen, it is not fun as the zooming in and out and moving around on the map is tediously. My experience is limited to Mapsource software, so maybe other applications do it better.

[gab74]

It will be beautiful having SL6000 with GPS and roadmap and Europe maps, please let me know whene there are any news...

[tg]

mjalkut,

You won't find such product for the simple reason that its potential users for the Z are less than a hundred. The companies that produce mapping applications for other PDAs are not interested. Independent developers cannot afford to license good map databases. I checked -- even if I create the software for free, with such a small user base, the cost for the end user would be hundreds of dollars (let me guess how many of you would buy it for that price

You make some good points but there is also another way to look at this.
Linux in general is certainly popular enough at this point that someone should
think about producing a full commercial GPS+maps package for it (if it does not already exist).
Once that is available, it should be easy to port it to Z (so whoever
does this comercially would mostly make money selling to people who use
linux on laptops and zaurus version would require little extra work/support).
Of course some will now argue that even on laptops there may not
currently be enough interest for this, but at least there is no doubt that
linux will survive on laptops (as opposed to Zaurus where it's anyone's
guess what if anything Sharp will do in the future).
I also happen to think that due to similarities of Linux to BSD, any GPS package developed for linux should be easy to port to OS X (and vice versa) and then you have enough users
between Apply and Linux comunities (of course same should be true for Adobe
Photoshop which runs great on OS X but Adobe does not want to produce Linux version
which I'm convinced would sell great).

[lucho]

tq,

Yes, there is possibility for what are you talking about, but the reality is that there is no such product at the moment.

[tg]

tq,

Yes, there is possibility for what are you talking about, but the reality is that there is no such product at the moment.

Yes, and is it surprising that marketing morons at companies which produce this type
of software do not see the light? It would obviously be better for them to produce a
cross platform product then for all of them to try to kill each other on Palm
and/or Pocket-PC. Whoever does linux release first will be guaranteed to
have market for themselves, at least for a while - and they can still sell for other platforms.
It's not that difficult to do cross platform and it is surprising that so many people who are payed to do this type of analysis are blind to it (why ca';t they draw a simple parallel and a look at giants like IBM, HP, Sun, Novell etc who are now falling over themselves trying to be associated with linux - it's so obvious there is a huge potential here - and all of these giants were initially just as suspicious of linux ever becoming comercially viable).

[noromamai]

Thanks all for replying to my question. It's about the same as what I uncovered already myself though. So there's not much hope of getting my zaurus to do some voice-navigation for me. But TQ has a good point, the zaurus is a linux device and if some company would just make a linux version of their voice-navigation software there woujld be a far larger potential market for it. I think there are enough geeks and nerd who are just waiting to put voice-navigation on their laptops/sff that they built into the dashboards of their cars and other mobile transportation vehicles. Zuber, can you tell us which company it was that inquired you about the voice-navi software?

[noromamai]

ahoy!

after having given up on using the Zaurus for Voice Navigation, BigBrowser (a new member of the forums) pointed out to me that there is a company wo makes Voice Navigation Software based on QT, which works on Windows, Linux and PocketPC. Of course, this won't run on the Zaurus, but perhaps if we can show that there is enough interest they might port it to the Zaurus. I've already mailed them asking them some questions and am awaiting their response. Will post an update once I got their reply.

[noromamai]

Got a quick (and short) reply:

"Embedded Linux is being considered and may come out later this year."

Well, there we have it,. now just let us hope for the best...

P.S. the company making the software can be found at http://www.directions.ltd.uk

[b2bpro]

Does anyone know about basic mapping software - I don't have a gps hooked up and I don't need voice instructions / direction indicators / distance to destination or anything.

I just want to be able to have maps that I can upload to my Z that I can reference instead of paper maps.

[swing]

"Embedded Linux is being considered and may come out later this year."

Indeed - I got a similar response from them last year, with a planned date of no earlier than Q4 04, so it's nice to see this date is not automatically 12 months from the request.

They already have a Linux version of their software, and seemed to understand the issues, and were well aware of the Zaurus when I spoke with them, which bodes well.

Also, the new TomTom Go unit www.tomtom.com is Linux based, which might mean TomTom could release an Embedded Linux version of TomTom Navigator if they felt there was sufficient demand.

Steve