I've got Gpsdrive running under X/Qt-debian quite nicely. I first tried without Debian by using gpsdrive from the Familiar feed together with X/Qt, which has all the packages required by the latest version of Gpsdrive (2.09) in its "testing" feed. However, I gave up after experiencing too many library incompatibility problems.
I wanted to try Debian anyway!
So now with Debian, I could just run "apt-get install gpsdrive" and Hey presto! There were a few additional things I had to do, however, which I did over a couple of months, so hopefully these are the most important notes I can remember on setting up :
*** NOTE. If you are just starting to look at GPS apps, I'd seriously take a look at Qpegps first. It's an excellent app that's written for Qtopia, so it's much better suited to the Zaurus and a lot easier to set up. It's just that Gpsdrive has additional functionality and I liked the challenge of getting it running. ***
# MAKEDEV ttyS3 ## to create the device within the Debian environment.
At various stages I needed to do a chmod 666 on /dev/ttyS3 (after installing gpsd, I think) and /dev/audio.
You don't need cardctl, setserial or anything like that if you have "cru" from the pocketworkstation Debian distribution (part of the postinstall script, I think). This will let you run such commands as cardctl from Qtopia whilst still in Debian.
Also, you don't need to install gpsd. The latest version of Gpsdrive will talk directly to your serial device.
I created a user "zaurus" with the same UID and GID as in Qtopia. This is to stop Gpsdrive complaining if you try and start it as root.
I created a script that can be run from an icon in the taskbar :
----
#!/bin/bash
# Enable the CF device. If you don't have cru, you'll need to
# run cardctl from Qtopia.
# Equivalent to "/usr/local/bin/cru cardctl resume"
/bin/echo "dev/null cardctl resume" >/dev/rootcmd
/bin/sleep 1
# -x is to create separate windows for Menu and Status.
# -1 is for 1 button mouse. May be better off without this.
# Took me ages to get the right numbers for height and width for C750 in portrait
# mode. These numbers seem to relate to map size rather than screen size.
# Any numbers above these and Gpsdrive will ignore -r and -s.
# -r is width
# -s is height
# -S don't show splash screen
# -e use Flite for speech output (more on this later)
su - zaurus -c "export DISPLAY=0:0;gpsdrive -x -1 -r 478 -s 599 -S -e"
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Installed MySQL for the waypoints database. Wrote a script to import the list of all UK speed traps into MySQL. There are too many for Gpsdrive/MySQL to handle - Gpsdrive crashes! Strangely enough, using a text file for waypoints seems to be faster and more stable than using a database.
Installed flite for speech output.
All was working nicely, except there was no speech output. A quick mail to the very responsive Gpsdrive mailing list and soon there was a fix in the CVS version of gpsdrive.
Installed all the apps/libs necessary for a build environment and compiled the CVS version for Debian/ARM.
Hope this information is useful to someone. If anyone is interested in the latest CVS binary of gpsdrive for Debian/ARM, I can post it here.
Cheers
Ian
