Kevin, While I understand and even share your frustration, the reality is that it is up to the product vendor to make a commercial decision of where to invest their software development energy. I'm not sure about what the "Universal" logo on the packet implied, but I tend to take a pragmatic view that if it doesn't mention Linux, you can't rely on the vendor support, and you can just hope that is being supported by the community at best effort. The reality for Garmin is that they feel they need to develop their own proprietary product (differentiating themselves from the competition) and they probably feel that 90% of their market is PC, 5% windows Mac OS, and that leaves them with needing to make a purely financial decision around Linux. I'd love to see a fully-supported Linux version from Garmin, preferably open-source, and they would get some street cred for doing this, but I am not holding my breath. They really don't have obligation to do this. (Of course you could boycott Garmin, but then you probably are going to get the same from competitors like Magellan).
I have an older Garmin, and I have to update my maps with MapSource using Windows. I can cope with that. On the other hand if I want to "clever" stuff, such as downloading tracklogs, filtering by date and converting them to kml for viewing on Google Maps, I use fully open-source software like gpsbabel which works great. There does appear to at least some Wine support for Garmin's MapSource with some versions - http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=227. I haven't tried this, YMMV. Regards, Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 12:02 AM, Kevin Shackleton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > SLUGers > > I apologise for a couple of emails I just bashed out. On wrapping up > this topic I realise I should have first asked SLUG if the group was OK > with the attack I made on Garmin Support before I launched it. > > Kevin > > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
