GPS Software

Hello everybody,

I am the new proud owner of an old GPS unit, Pharos GPS-360 that shipped with Microsoft’s Streets and Trips 2006. Can an experienced user point me in the direction.

What I have tried: gpsdrive

I installed gpsdrive via Yast2 and it runs just fine, but it doesn’t notice (or maybe it shouldn’t even notice) that I have the GPS connected via USB. Here is the output of dmesg showing the GPS usb:


hub 2-0:1.0: unable to enumerate USB device on port 6
usb 3-3: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 3
usb 3-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
pl2303 3-3:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
usb 3-3: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usb 3-3: New USB device found, idVendor=067b, idProduct=aaa0
usb 3-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 3-3: Product: USB-Serial Controller
usb 3-3: Manufacturer: Prolific Technology Inc.
usb 3-3: SerialNumber: 12345678

I am running OpenSuSE 11.0

Thanks in advance for viewing.

Necromatic

I know nothing about gpsdrive but was curious enough to look it up. It seems it uses gpsd to listen to the device. gpsd has its own website, linked to from the gpsdrive website. Do you have gpsd installed and running? The USB device is nothing more than a quite common USB to serial adaptor and you would configure gpsd to talk to /dev/usb/tty0 or /dev/ttyUSB0 or something like that. After you have plugged in the device you should be able to see the abovementioned device file.

Thanks for your response. I haven’t configured gpsd and that’s probably the problem. Once I get home later I’ll have to toy around with it and see what I can do. Will post the results later :slight_smile:

Hi. Maybe it’s a good idea to set your GPS to NMEA. This protocoll should work with every unit.
Gpsdrive uses gpsd to get data from your GPS, so gpsd is probably installed already.
When you plug in your GPS unit gpsd should autostart. If not start it as root. I think ken_yap is right with the interface, so it should be

gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0

You can connect to gpsd and see its output with

telnet localhost 2947
Then type "R" in telnet.

For some reason gpsdrive can’t connect to my GPS unit since some time but as I don’t need gpsdrive I didn’t really care about it. Everything else works fine with my old Garmin Etrex Legend.

You’ll find some gps software in the GEO repository: Index of /repositories/Application:/Geo Gpsbabel is one of my favorites. With this very nice commandline tool you can easily transfer data from/to your gps and convert it into a plethora of formats, e.g. kml for GoogleEarth. You may also want to try Merkaartor if you are interested in contributing to openstreetmap. Geotagging tools are available, too.