[Wlug] GPS on Linux

[Richard Klein]

Andy,
	I think you were talking about using a GPS receiver with Linux after 
the last meeting.  The receiver I had mentioned came in a couple days 
ago.  It's a Navibe SP611 
(http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId=NAVIBE-ORN), and it does indeed output NMEA 0183. 
The Navibe website is easy enough to find (http://www.navibe.com/), but 
it doesn't even acknowledge the existence of the SP611.

	Linux seems to recognize the serial/USB bridge in the GPS as a Prolific PL-2303:
dmesg says:
usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
pl2303 2-1:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
usb 2-1: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0

But I can't get GPSMan or GPSDrive to recognize it.  "cat /dev/ttyUSB0" gets no response, and I have to hit CTRL-C to get the command prompt back.

Per this page (http://koti.mbnet.fi/lonnberg/pl2303x.html) I found that bMaxPacketSize0 = 64, which suggests the bridge is a PL-2303X rather than a plain vanilla PL-2303.  Apparently this used to require a patch, but only up to kernel 2.6.8.  uname -r says I'm at 2.6.15-1-686, so this shouldn't be an issue.

What should I try now?

Oh, the GPS receiver did send a stream of NMEA data to my Windows computer at work with GPSDiag, so the reciever doesn't seem to be defective.

-- 
Rich