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Two Ways To Use GPS With Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Whether you're wardriving, vacationing or building a Car PC, a Global Positioning System is a handy tool. Interacting with your GPS via your PC makes for an even better GPS experience. As a Linux user, GPS/PC integration can be somewhat sketchy. Vendors don't write software and drivers for Linux; it's probably safe to assume that the good folks over at Garmin would say something along the lines of "Lih-what?". Have no fear! Using your GPS with Linux isn't impossible! Check out this review over at LinuxForumsDOTorg of two fairly robust GPS navigation programs for Linux."
I use gpsdrive without any driver issues. The real problem is the availability of maps.
Linux is perhaps the most stable operating system currently on the market. In fact, in several studies that I've seen, Linux as an embedded system outperforms and crashes less often than dedicated software on traditional GPS systems.
Vendors don't write software and drivers for Linux
Who cares about software and drivers. Open protocols and open standards, that's what we need!
bash$
Most GPS receivers will deliver their signals in NMEA format, which is an accepted standard. Most of the USB units even only contain a pl2303 chip or another form of USB2Serial driver and work just fine. I bought mine on eBay, just plugged it in, and hotplug did most of the work. It appeared as a new USB serial port, so I could gpsdrive without any problems.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Slightly related, someone recently posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list, with a guide for how to get the Pharos GPS-360 (as sold in the "Microsoft Streets & Trips 2005 with GPS locator" package) working under linux. Might be useful to some people
Um, Does your GPS output NMEA? Read the owners manual. If you read the article, then you would know both programs use NMEA from the GPS on a serial port.
If your GPS provides it then Ok it should work, If it doesn't, then your milage may vary.
The truth shall set you free!
gpsd: serve up realtime GPS data
s /html57_us er/v.in.garmin.html
http://gpsd.berlios.de
gpstrans: download/upload Garmin data
http://gpstrans.sourceforge.net
gpsbabel: up/download & convert GPS data
http://gpsbabel.sourceforge.net
v.in.garmin + GRASS GIS 5.7: download GPS directly into serious mapping & analysis software
http://grass.ibiblio.org/grass57/manual
http://grass.ibiblio.org
have fun, don't get lost.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
I don't want to torpedo the purpose of this whole article, but Linux isn't as far out in the cold as you might think. Most GPS programs out there use the NMEA protocol which is handled over a common serial port. The article poster seems to imply that Linux is left out in terms of drivers, but the fact is that most GPS units support the NMEA protocol. That includes Garmin, Magellan and others. If you have a common DB9 serial connector and the right cable, you can get any number of GPS units to work with any number of programs.
That being said, what is troubling is the "any number of programs" that I mentioned above. There really is not a large community of developers working on consumer mapping applications. If you look hard enough, you may stumble across some gems here and there, but for the most part the Linux scene is noticably lacking.
Tuxmobil's Page is a good place to start looking at different apps.
Hmmm...
I've got my Garmin Vista talking to my OS X box via a Keyspan USB to serial cable and run the freeware GPS Connect and its shareware big brother Terrabrowser to upload and download waypoints.
This sig intentionally left justified.
I hand-built serial cables using plugs I got from this guy (Elsewhere on that site there's links to folks all over the world selling the same plugs for a range of different GPS receivers). Apparently even the tiny little Garmin Geko 201 and Geko 301 (but not the 101 model) also speak serial - and they're tiny cute little things they are!!!
My little eTrex has a menu with a whole bunch of different 'languages' that it will speak (and/or receive) via the serial port. According to the manual (warning: pdf) (page 45) it speaks NMEA 0183, a bunch of proprietary Garmin stuff and a couple of flavours suitable for differential work. I know from fiddling with mine that it also speaks a 'plain text' (they're all plain text, but this one is more so) format that is quite human readable and probably quite easily parseable with some perl.
Another imporant point about GPS and Linux (*nix in general is time). GPS requires incredibly accurate time to operate, so by implication GPS receivers make excellent clocks. Last time I checked xntp had support for NMEA (GPS) as a time source.
A quick freshmeat (if 'google' is a verb, then surely 'freshmeat' can be one too!) will tell you that GPS on *nix is nothing new!!! (Not all of those returns are gps nav related, but there's a lot of stuff to parse gps sentences, moving maps, program receivers, all kinds of goodies!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
OLEX is a nice piece of commercial mapping software that runs under Linux, and to my knowledge there is a lot of very positive feedback from the local fisherman in the area where I work, Scotland, West Highlands.
Our diversity is our strength
GIS-Knoppix (http://www.sourcepole.com/gis-knoppix/) comes with a set of pre-installed GIS (Geographical Info Systems) software and utilities including GPSDrive.o s&os=Linux is an excellent resource fo GIS, GPS and related tools including many for Linux &c.
A.
http://www.freegis.org/browse.en.html?category=
Garmin has gone out of their way to not document the WIRE PROTOCOL of the USB units (60C, 76C, 96C, VistaC, Quest, 26xx, etc.) but to instead document the API into their underachieving Windows driver.
An earlier version of the spec pretended to be a protocol spec. I contacted them with a number of discrepancies betweeen my observations on a protocol analyzer and that specification. Within a few weeks, a new version of the spec appeared that removed the pretense of being a protocol spec.