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navit

Offline turn-by-turn navigation that follows the GPS, with spoken directions

What it does

A navigation program for a laptop or a cyberdeck: a moving map that follows your position from gpsd, routes to an address or a point you pick on the map, and speaks the turns through espeak-ng. It reads maps from files on the disk, so once the maps are installed nothing it does needs a network. With no destination set it is a situational display: the map follows the GPS and shows position and speed.

Why you would want it

A phone's navigation needs the phone network for its maps and often for its routing, which is the thing that is missing in a field deployment, at a remote site or after a storm. Navit with the maps already on the machine keeps working. It is the offline alternative to phone or web navigation, and it shares the same gpsd feed as APRS, grid-square and time tools rather than taking the receiver for itself.

Before it will work

A GPS receiver served by gpsd (the gpsd unit, installed first), and maps: the osm-regions and osm-navit units, which need your regions set first with hammunition station set --map-regions. The launcher runs hammunition maps navit, which opens the configuration osm-navit writes, so it has nothing to open until osm-navit has installed. A repeater layer from hammunition maps repeaters import is added to a copy of it in your own data directory, which the launcher then opens. Spoken directions need working audio output.

How it installs

  • apt: navit, navit-gui-internal, navit-graphics-gtk-drawing-area, espeak-ng, maptool

Known problems

The internal GUI is built for a touch screen: its menus are large tiles opened by clicking the map, and there is no menu bar, which surprises anyone expecting a desktop application. The launcher's configuration is not edited by hand: it is generated from Debian's /etc/navit/navit.xml with the speech set to espeak-ng and the installed maps added, and it is rewritten on every install, so a change made to it is lost. Your own ~/.navit directory, which holds bookmarks and the last destination, is never touched. Whether Navit routes across two separately converted regions, such as a trip from one state into the next, has not yet been measured on hardware.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

The Navit wiki (https://wiki.navit-project.org/) and the project's GitHub issues (https://github.com/navit-gps/navit/issues).

Source: catalog/packages/navit.yaml