Thread: New Linux Project (windows maybe)

If this thing comes together it will rock! Finally a way to ditch unstable windows and get a customized platform for our cars.

I like bigb's idea on how to get the GPS stuff going. Personally I wouldn't mind just having a scrolling map at first that is zoomable. Later on if people develop interest in the project maybe a complete navigation solution could be started but for the begining just keep it simple, unless some of you programers know how to do this in the first place...

Anyway, I'm excited where this is headed!

I think gpsdrive can be a starting point for the gps.
It may use mapblast/expedia in semiautomated fashion, so it shouldn't be a big deal to use their scripts to begin with...( geo-code -> gpsfetchmap -> .gif )

I played around with GPSdrive and I was impressed with it's ability to download maps as well as it's features and user interface. The thing that put my off from deciding to move to it was the pain in downloading maps for the area desired.

If a feature where added that would allow a user to select say a state like California and then select the level of zoom for maps downloaded and then let the thing chug away that would get GPSdrive moving. I know there is a script to do this but a nice user interface would be so much easier to work with. How hard would it be to add this?

On another note I was thinking it would be nice to have an interface that combines both MP3 and GPS capabilities onto the screen at the same time. I think most systems swap between solely GPS and MP3 but I think a completly integrated version almost like a "hybird" of the two would be a great option to have. There would of course be some sacrifice on space on the screen but it would mean less swapping between screens and perhaps seem more integrated for the car. There could be sole GPS and MP3 screens that could be switched to if the user wanted to do something particular with either of them.

I have been playing with the same thought for a little while, considering irmp3 as the core, and creating a qt frontend. Modules would have to be made for mplayer and maybe bluetooth. (check out bluexmms for ideas)
Anybody tried running any windows gps-apps with Wine (windows emulator)?
If our efforts could be combined, I may contribute with C++, C and perl programming.

Well, I started a little to test my idea and see if it's workable. It does seem like it MAY work, though the image packs would be quite large. And even w/ me on a T1 line, the speed of MapBlast is slowing things down.

What it does :
Starts at a location (say my house), zooms in all the way, takes the image.
It then moves left 100 times, grabbing images the whole way. Follows that same principle for an area 200x200(40,000) images are then downloaded.

The part I still need to do :
"Stitch" the images together to create a large image of the intended area.

Problems :
It's clumsy. It requires some storage, quite a bit actually. ( ~10K for the image, times 40,000) or about 400 megs of images. On release, I'd assume MapBlast would get ****ed. lol..

And yes, some windows software will run in a Wine window, though I don't know if that's quite the solution we're looking for. We're kinda going for a native Linux solution w/ a functioning windows port.

As far as the window switching(between GPS, and Mp3), I beleive what I am thinking(need to get w/ hijinks on this one) was instead of a straight "screen" idea, like most have now, we allow "tiled" screens. So you could have the following :

Say you have "Icon1" on the main screen set for "GPS". by clicking it, Icon1's screen init is read, and it tells the software how to setup for that Icon. Whether it be split screen(vertical/horizontal), or dual split, w/ 1 larger section, and the other half split again. Thus allowing you to have say "GPS" data on the right of the screen, the mp3 visualization on the top left, and a playlist control on the bottom left. Of course we'd have to have conditions, etc. (say if an mp3 is not playing, it would not display that information, or if your using an FM tuner card it would display that info instead.

I'm going to put together somewhat of a framework idea today, which will be posted.

Thanks for all your input guys, and dieselBenz, we're going to be using SourceForge, so of course any help you could give would be great.

Brian..

I thought GPS drive automatically stiched the gif's together? Also, what was the amount of area covered by the 200x200 area zoomed in all the way? If I remember correctly the zoom level all the way in was almost to close so that side streets couldn't be seen. If you zoom out a level or two say enough to be able to see other side streets you could cover a lot more territory for the same amount of disk space space.

How about being able to cut it down a bit, so if you only have a 2x16 line LCD display on the parallel port, you are still able to play mp3s just as well as if you had a full colour touch screen.

Just a thought.....