I'll be traveling to Europe soon and I would like to have a navigation system for casual city exploration while I'm there. Since I do not want to pay data roaming charges, I wanted to test a software that stores the maps on the device (Blackberry 8900).
WeTravel is a new free-for-personal-use GPS navigation system that can use OpenStreetMap database. WeTravel is written in J2ME, so it should work on many mobile platforms that have Java support, including my Blackberry. The BB support is still in development, but that's not our topic today.
In order to create maps for WeTravel, we will use the MapGenerator software provided by them downloadable from WeTravel Downloads page. There are no Linux versions available (for now?) but it is written in Java. I downloaded the latest version 0.1.2. After downloading, unzip the file and you should have two files:
start Wetravel Mapgenerator.exe
WeTravel_Mapgenerator.jar
Since I'm running under Ubuntu 9.10, I wanted to start the jar file directly without running the exe file using the following command.
In the window that opens up, we can set the folders for OSM maps, WeTravel Maps, and settings for the mysql database required for the OSM>WeTravel map conversion.
If you do not have a MySQL database check the see also section below, I have some links to howto install MySQL in ubuntu in a matter of minutes. Following the MySQL guidelines I installed the MySQL server and created a database on my laptop.
Once all these settings are entered, hit OK and the program crashes (at least it crashed for me).
Then next time I tried to start it kept telling me that I should start it from the *.exe file. Since I didn't have windows running, I wanted to try wine.
wine "start Wetravel Mapgenerator.exe"
This crashed as well, but I saw that it created some files under WeTravelGen folder, next to the exe file. After this, I tried to run the jar file again with java and it seems to work.
I tried to convert Florida.OSM to a WeTravel map, however it turned out to be a bigger task for my laptop. It ran from Saturday morning to Monday morning nonstop, and it could only complete the initial steps of: Writing the OSM to the MySQL database, and creating some ATLAS files (tiled images for different zoom levels).
So I technically can't say that it works 100% but it looks promising, and I'll write back as soon as I can test it.
