Gnome Maps search function

I installed gnome maps (apt install gnome-maps) on Xubuntu 16.04. It is a great tool and running fine. The only problem is that I do not understand how to use the search function. When I enter a place in the search bar, I get a suggestion list with the correct city and country etc, but whatever I select or type nothing happens.

I would expect when I enter Paris,France and select it from the offered List, to tool centers Paris and put a cursor on it. I can not figure out how to do that. What am I missing?

As I did not want to install flatpack I installed from source. Version 3.38 has a working search function. The newer versions do not work in bionic since they use a newer glib2-0 library (>2.66) than available for bionic.

Since the gmaps sources do not come with installation instructions here is how it can be installed on Ubuntu 18.04 - bionic. Gmaps does use Meson/Ninja for building the sources. Its not installed by default in bionic, so install it first

 sudo apt install meson ninja-build

Get the sources here: https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-maps/3.38/gnome-maps-3.38.6.tar.xz. Download and extract tarball. For the example the folder with the extracted files was names "src". First install all required dependencies (gjs-1.0, gee-0.8, folks, libgeocode-glib-1-0, champlain-0.12, rest-0.7)

sudo apt install libgjs-dev
sudo apt install libgee-0.8-dev
sudo apt install libfolks-dev
sudo apt install libgeocode-glib-dev
sudo apt install libchamplain-0.12-dev
sudo apt install librest-dev

To build and install enter the unpacked folder src. It should contain the file "meson.build"

cd src
meson --prefix=/usr builddir
ninja -C builddir 
sudo ninja -C builddir install

The meson command should list all dependencies and show all with a green YES. I got one red NO which was "appstream-util", but the application still worked. (please comment if you know what it is, what the package name is and why its needed). Do not forget the "sudo" before the last install command.

The application is started from the command line with

gapplication launch org.gnome.Maps

You can put that line into a launcher in the panel. After installation the sources are not required any more and can be deleted.

Try the flatpak version of gnome-maps: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.Maps

It has worked for me on Ubuntu 18.04 x64: favorites are back and search function works as expected.

1. Install Flatpak

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak

2. Install the Software Flatpak plugin

sudo apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak  

3. Add the Flathub repository

sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

4. Restart (if necessary)

5. Install Gnome-Maps via Gnome-Software or via the command line

sudo flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Maps

6. Run the app

flatpak run org.gnome.Maps