! am a real sucker for punishment sometimes, so I decided to give the vector map creation another go. I learned a few things that may be useful to others.
Because of my memory limitations (i.e. my PC; I'm not senile. Yet) I tried to build some maps using a bounding box to limit the size of the generated map. For example, to create a map of Nashua, NH, from the full NH map:
osmosis --rb file=new_hampshire.osm.pbf --mapfile-writer file=NashuaGF.map type=HD bbox=42.704465,-71.541876,42.775014,-71.420628
I got the bounding box points from GE.
I also tried the same thing using the bz2 file from Cloudmade downloads:
osmosis --rx file=new_hampshire.osm.bz2 --mapfile-writer file=NashuaCM.map type=HD bbox=42.704465,-71.541876,42.775014,-71.420628
Both of these worked fine, even though I can't generate a map of the whole of NH. They only took 2-3 minutes.
As another example, create a Wheatley map from the Cloudmade bz2 file for England:
osmosis --rx file=england.osm.bz2 --mapfile-writer file=Wheatley.map type=HD bbox=51.720488,-1.323776,51.794130,-1.081554
There's a reason I chose to create this map from the Cloudmade files, but I'll put that in another post. This example is important, because although the resulting map is very small, the starting file is large: 368Mb. It seems the memory limitations are mainly associated with file writing, not the file reading. So anyone should be able to create small maps from large starting files, even if you don't have access to a big Debian server like Peter
You do have to be patient though; this one took about 2.5 hours.
A couple of additional notes;
You do not need to unzip the .bz2 file to get a .osm file, even though the Wiki here;
http://http://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/wiki/MapFileWriterOsmosis implies that you do.
You might get a lot of warnings at the end that it couldn't delete files "C:Documents and Settings<YourName>Local SettingsTempidx********.tmp". At least, I get this every time. You should go and delete these files manually, because they can be very large (>1Gb).
I also created a map of southern NH. I suspect nobody else will want this, but if they do then I'll upload it. I cannot create a map of some parts of NH, not even a very small map. I logged an issue at MapForge regarding this:
http://http://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/issues/detail?id=134&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Stars%20Owner%20Summary%20ModifiedThe real good news is that every map I have managed to create seems to work great in Locus
