Compatibility issuesĭespite the age of the project, a detailed list of all the GPS models that this distribution supports is not available. I used a clean installation of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to test it and it worked perfectly, following the detailed steps. The extra applications that can be installed come on a separate script, that also needed some tweaks (and to remove some applications which I could not find a working link for).įinally, I could compile the whole system and most of the applications, and the source code with all of those fixes is now available as a fork of the original repository here. When I noticed that I could not directly compile the system, and that the link for a precompiled version was no longer available, I decided to try to fix the missing dependencies and errors, so that I could compile it.Īfter adding some missing dependencies (that were not specified in the documentation) and looking for updated links for many of them, the base system was able to compile. A few weeks ago, I was looking for alternative uses for my TomTom XXL IQ Routes that I no longer use, and I found this project. The last commit for that repository was published on January 2017, which is much more recent, but since then several dependency sources have stopped working, and the system cannot be directly compiled following the indicated steps. Shortly after, a French developer known as Clément Gerardin collected all the available information that he could find, and created an unofficial wiki and repository, so that the development could continue. Nevertheless, at that time GPS devices were still being used for its main purpose, so the community did not show much interest on the project and the official website went down in 2014. It even included support for two different GPS applications: Navit and TomTom’s original software. The distribution featured a basic but functional graphical interface, drivers for the majority of the components of the different devices, and many preinstalled services (such as an FTP, SSH and Telnet server) and applications (utilities, games, audio players…). Some years ago, in 2006, a mainly German developer team released a lightweight Linux distribution for those devices, called OpenTom.
About OpenTomĪmong the different GPS brands that were popular in the past, TomTom devices are very interesting to explore, as their software is based on Linux and the brand made most of it open-source.
However, lots of people still have one of those devices lying around, that they can give a second life to (or at least to tinker with). Nowadays, the use of dedicated GPS devices has been relegated to a second place, as almost everyone has a smartphone with a built-in GPS to calculate the needed routes. However, an automatically translated version can be found here. This article was originally written in English.
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