Notices

can this app be used with any windows wardriving programs such as NetStumbler? If so, which settings should I use?

I presume no-one in the Southern hemisphere has ever use NMEA logging? There's a big blooper in formatting negative latitudes. Patch coming up.

Columbus Navigation Toolkit is not developed any more (AFAIK) for N900 and it is unstable - segfaults soon after some use, so it should not be in extras-testing...

A great pity, as it looks good and offers gpsd-like functionality that no-other app does, AFAIK. GPSd itself is not installable.

@handaxe @acrux I'd certainly agree with you there. I ran it for a few hours the other day and, apart from the bug I mentioned, it seemed OK. Happy to contribute some of my limited time to fixing the segfault if someone can tell me how to reproduce it.

I've written to Tom Swindell about the bug fix, haven't heard back yet.

Difficult to say how to reproduce it - it just segfaulted after some use. Sometimes after 5 minutes, sometimes after half an hour. We had a discussion with Tom about that and he said he has to prepare a debug version of the program for testing. But he probably had no time for that...

avidscavenger, while I also haven't encountered segfault, I really appreciate your will to spend some time with this nice program. It have great potential, especially, considered in pair with upcoming Body Replacement, that will allow connecting external antenna to GPS.

Now, haven't you thought about requesting maintainership for this package? If original maintainer won't respond in time, Maemo maintaining team could assist in getting maintainership other way. Of course, if they find time for it between constantly bashing themselves in BoD<->Council thread(s), but that's another story.

/Estel

Hmmm I managed to get the segfault a few times. Now I've built a debug version and it's been running for a couple of hours now without segfaulting. I'll leave it running overnight to see if I can get anything but it's always possible that we have an Eisenbug.

Is there anyone out there who's comfortable running gdb and reporting back if they can reproduce the problem? Even better, if anyone knows how to get a core dump on the N900 then you could just send it to me.

I had it segfault on me last night whilst in server mode. I now have core-dumps set-up and will see what I can get.

Running gdb requires your debug version, as well as the linked lib*.dbg.

Great - can you tell me how or give me a reference on setting up core dumps?

Here are the two .deb files built for debugging:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/....3-1_armel.deb
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/....3-1_armel.deb

I ran gdb/columbus overnight and it didn't crash. But possibly running without gdb but with core dumps will help.

Unfortunately this morning my N900 seems to have bricked. I'm hesitating before reflashing it in the hope that it magically comes back to life. But I may be unable to help you further with this issue for some time.

[UPDATE]My phone is unbricked. The problem was somehow caused by columbus - its install scripts removed some library directories from /etc/ld.so.conf which mean that core apps (modest) wouldn't load which sent the phone into a reboot loop.

Jonathan