My Opera
Navigon Fresh, Android, Ubuntu and Wine
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 11:51:08 AM
I decided that I wanted to try out the Navigon GPS software on my Android phone, a HTC Hero. Downloading the free Navigon trial from the Android Market initially appeared to go smoothly, until I started the application.Navigon - for Android
On starting the program, it turned out that the maps and voices still needed to be downloaded and that the "right" way to do this was using a program called "Navigon Fresh" that is downloadable from Navigon's website. So far so good.
When arriving at the site, it turned out that there was not a Linux version available for download to my Ubuntu computer. This is particularly odd, because Navigon Fresh is a Qt based application and one of the major benefits of Qt is being able to support multiple platforms easily. Also, many of us have chosen Android phones because they run Linux and it is a shame to then have to get a Windows computer to install things. Step in Wine
Installing Navigon Fresh using Wine went very smoothly, the application started and all seemed good. However, for some reason the software could not see the cell phone's memory card and was uninterested in letting me download anything until this hurdle was overcome.
The recipe for success turned out to be:
1. Connect the phone to the computer and choose to mount the USB disk on the phone's notification menu
2. On the computer, start winecfg, choose "Drives", change the settings for the USB disk from "Autodetect" to "Floppy Disk" and press "Ok"
Restart Navigon Fresh and the device will be detected correctly and the maps and voices can be downloaded.
frodeh # Tuesday, May 18, 2010 12:13:10 PM
I installed the free trial of Navigon, and at startup itasked to me download the maps. This failed since I did not have space on the storage card, - but when I had cleaned it up, - the installation went smoothly over WLAN, - no extra software needed.
When that was in place, I realized two things:
a) Stupid that the 10 days I used to get a clean card was subtracted from the 30 days evaluation.
and b) The usability is far from that of a cheap dedicated device, (and also far from the iPhone version), - so, new dedicated device already in the mail.
Michael Linktheoperalink # Tuesday, May 18, 2010 1:50:24 PM
I have a cheap dedicated device that I've been happy with, but the vendor has stopped providing updates to the software. I was hoping that my phone would be good enough to take on holidays and so forth. We have an Iphone at home, perhaps we should use that instead if it is as you say.