PUBLIC MARKS from Spone with tags gps & software

This is a survey of Linux applications (almost all of them are Free Software) for navigation with laptops, notebooks, handhelds, PDAs and mobile phones. They are useful for bikers, car drivers, ship and air plane navigators and others. Additionally there are map conversion tools and links to freely available maps for GPS devices.

gpsd is a service daemon that monitors one or more GPSes or AIS receivers attached to a host computer through serial or USB ports, making all data on the location/course/velocity of the sensors available to be queried on TCP port 2947 of the host computer. With gpsd, multiple location-aware client applications (such as navigational and wardriving software) can share access to receivers without contention or loss of data. Also, gpsd responds to queries with a format that is substantially easier to parse than the NMEA 0183 emitted by most GPSes. The gpsd distribution includes a linkable C service library, a C wrapper class, and a Python module that developers of gpsd-aware applications can use to encapsulate all communication with gpsd.

Testing GPS applications requires a gps receiver and an antenna in a position to receive the satellite signals. This, however, is rarely the case when doing software testing at a computer's keyboard. This is where gpsfeed can be of help.