On 2/13/07, Michael A Peters <mpeters@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Howdy all - I have a Garmin "etrex Legend" hand held GPS unit. I bought it for my field herping hobby (looking for wild reptiles and amphibians). It came with a serial cable for connecting to a PC but software is only for Windows. I don't want to buy the software and try with w/ wine/CXO because it it doesn't work then I wasted money, and I have not had software that interfaces with hardware (such as a serial port) ever work well in CXO. Since spring is almost here, I'd like an easier way to use it in Linux rather than just manually reading the collected waypoints and entering them into my field reports. What I would like to do is to be able to read waypoints right off the unit through a cable (either serial or, if one is available, a USB cable) into Linux. It also would be nice to hand make some maps that I can use to easily return to a particular spot, or to give to researchers to get to a particular spot if I find a range extension for a species that needs to be verified or a remnant population for a species in decline thought to be gone from an area. Both of those things happen fairly regularly where I am at (though not yet by me), as there is much wilderness area that isn't well documented for herp species. It also would be nice to be able to look at a topographical map, and enter waypoints into some linux program that I can then enter into the GPS to guide me with respect to how to get to a location that looks interesting. Has anyone done this kind of thing in Fedora, and possibly know where pre-packaged RPMs exist?
Get hold of gpsbabel (http://www.gpsbabel.org). There's an rpm on the website. It works well for up/downloading waypoints, routes and tracks. Once you have these on your linux box, there are lots of websites that let you upload them to google maps. Or if you're so inclined get a google maps developer key (they're gratis) and roll you're own. Other tools which may be interesting are gpsdrive and gpsman. You'll have to google for their websites, I didn't use them so didn't save the info. HTH, Chris
