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Table of Contents
GPS-devices
Overview
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. GPS devices (also referred to as GPS receivers) provide the user with his/her geographic coordinates. GPS sport watches allow to save and export tracks, that is collections of geo-localized points describing the run or any movement that was done. This howto is based on experiences on Garmin Etrex Legend HCx (GPS device) and, on Slackware 15.0, on a Garmin Forerunner 205 (GPS sport watch); but it should also work at least for any Garmin GPS receiver.
Software
I'm mostly using gpsbabel; this command line tool 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 a GPS device is connected to the computer, it becomes recognized as a 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 its own drivers so the module garmin_gps is not needed. One can blacklist it by adding in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf the line
blacklist garmin_gps
udev-rules
If you want to access the device as a non-root user, the following udev rule allows users who are members 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 is 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 website for ZombieTrackerGPS
The openstreetmap project
Sources
* Originally written by Markus Hutmacher