Mathieu Baudier wrote:
Anyone ever used the iGPS-500 under CentOS 5? Any recommendations on a USB-based GPS that "just works"?
I use the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx on CentOS. This is a very good device (but more for "offroad" activities).
there's two generic families of GPS's, simple antenna+radio-only units which just report position over USB (or on older ones, rs232 serial), and fancy handheld units that have mapping and tracking and all kinda bells and whistles such as the various Garmin units
most folks who want a GPS to connect to a computer are probably more interested in the simple kind, as they want to use the computer for any mapping etc. most all simple GPS's speak in NMEA, which just transmits a constant stream of simple ascii 'sentences' with the current location and some metadata. fancy GPS's like the garmins can speak either simple NMEA or their own Garmin protocol which supports mapping, waypoints, etc
typical NMEA output is...
$GPGGA,123519,4807.038,N,01131.000,E,1,08,0.9,545.4,M,46.9,M,,*47
(12:35:19 UTC, 48 deg. 07.038' N, 11 deg 31.000' E latitude), quality 1, 8 sats, etcetc
most any NMEA USB simple GPS should work, they all emulate a USB serial port on the PC side, and just spew their NMEA stream over this 'serial' port. for instance, this http://www.amazon.com/GlobalSat-BU-353-Waterproof-USB-Receiver/dp/B000PKX2KA which uses thee excellent SIRF GPS chip, uses a Prolific PL2303 USB-serial adapter chip, which I'm pretty sure is easily supported on linux (havent tested it, hwoever)