Notices

I was looking on KDE EDU site and discovered that marble virtual globe is available on the N900.

See:

http://marble.garage.maemo.org/
http://edu.kde.org/marble/download.php
http://nienhueser.de/blog/?p=95

ScreenShots:

http://edu.kde.org/marble/screenshot...ble_maemo0.jpg
http://edu.kde.org/marble/screenshot...ble_maemo1.png

Not sure if this is old news, but thought that some might be interested

Why they don't use the maemo.org repos?

It turns out that there are newer versions of the package now in extras-devel with plugins and extra maps. See:
http://maemo.org/packages/view/marble/
http://maemo.org/packages/view/marble-plugins/
http://maemo.org/packages/view/marble-maps/

I promoted marble to extras-testing earlier today, feel free to test it. This is not a stable version from the version number, but should run pretty smooth already. The final version 1.0 is going to be released around the end of January.

Please see http://marble.garage.maemo.org/testing for further details. Note that if you want to use offline routing you need an additional package, monav-routing-daemon. It is available in extras-devel, but only version 0.2-release-1 works with Marble, while version 0.2-2010-12-10 will not work. The former will probably be promoted to extras-testing in a few days as well.

-I have been playing with Marble for a little while an have discovered a few things:

1. If you installed the version in the stable repository (http://marble.garage.maemo.org/) before upgrading to the version in extras-testing, Marble may continue to crash whenever it is launched.
To fix this problem, you may need to delete the Marble configuration file in /home/user/.config/kde.org/ (at least I think that is is the directory that it was in )

2. For nicer OpenStreet Maps rendering (Osmarender tiles) as described in http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/KDE_Marble, do the following:

-Become root (you need rootsh installed)
-edit the /home/opt/marble/share/marble/data/maps/earth/openstreetmap/openstreetmap.dgml (vi, nano, or any other text editor should be fine)
- in the downloadUrl tag section add <downloadUrl protocol="http" host="a.tah.openstreetmap.org" path="/Tiles/tile/" />

- enclose the other three downloadUrl lines in <!-- -->

The final result should look something like this
(Instructions adapted from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/KDE_Marble)

Just installed the monad routing daemon and will be trying out offline routing with downloaded maps. I'll post again if i find anything interesting.

Looks nice, but its laggy like hell. Satellite view i can't get to work at all.

Any chance you still have the old config file? I'd like to fix bugs

You can extend the osmarender example a bit to be able to switch the layers dynamically inside Marble like in this screenshot:


Fullscreen here (1.8 MB). See http://nienhueser.de/marble/osm-theme/ for the corresponding dgml file. In case you want to try that one, please note that you must create base tiles for both layers before:

The above is for the desktop version, on the N900 you need to exchange ~ with /home/user/MyDocs

You must not uncheck all three layers (mapnik, osmarender, hillshading) at once for that dgml. When violating any of both (base tiles missing or no texture layer checked), the current version of Marble will crash. That's one of the reasons we don't extend the current dgml file like this. I hope to have fixes for both soon though.

Any chance you could make it use hardware acceleration since currently it is unusable slow. Or even just making it full-screen would probably make it at least usable.

Can you give me a bit more quantitative descriptions of "laggy as hell" and "unusable slow"? It should render with 2-3 fps, though certain settings can slow it down, e.g. the projection: Please switch to Mercator projection, that should improve performance. It will be default in the next version. To do that, open the application menu, choose "Map View" and change the projection in the top most input field. Also make sure to use the OpenStreetMap theme.

OpenGL support is planned for Marble 1.1 or 1.2, that's around April or end of 2011, respectively.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. the Mercator projection is a bit better but the scrolling is still weeery slow and laggy. I too get about 2 frames per second but isn't something between 15 and 25 a bit more regular fps for a program (I don't say you have to get something like that at least right away but something like 10 fps would be nice). Could you consider adding a full-screen option like I suggested before, it would probably considerably raise the performance. But other than performance this program really seems promising, keep up the good work!