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Table of Contents
GPS-devices
Overview
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. GPS-devices (also refered to as GPS-receiver) provide the user with his/her geographic coordinates. I'm using a Garmin Etrex Legend HCx, my expriences in this howto refer to this device, but it should also work at least for any Garmin-GPS-receiver.
Software
I'm mostly using gpsbabel, this commandlinetool can retrieve and send data from/to a GPS-device. There's also qlandkartegt which can deal with the data provided by the GPS-receiver. Both are available via slackbuilds.org
Connecting the Device
When the GPS-device is connected to the computer, it becomes recognized as an USB-device by udev and the module garmin_gps is loaded. In most cases the module will not work for us. Fortunately gpsbabel comes with it's own drivers, the module garmin_gps is not needed. On my Computer I've blacklisted it in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
udev-rules
If you want to access the device as a non-root user, the following udev-rule allows users who are member of the plugdev-group to access the GPS-device.
# /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules ATTR{idVendor}=="091e", ATTR{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="666", GROUP="plugdev"
Sending Data to the Device
As an example here the code which transfers a gpx waypoint-file to a Garmin-GPS-device.
gpsbabel -i gpx -f $file -o garmin -F usb:
Further Reading
The website for gpsbabel
The website for qlandkartegt
The openstreetmap project
Sources
* Originally written by User Markus Hutmacher