[ gpsdrive ] Notes on setting up gpsd, cgpxlogger, and GpsDrive on Mac OSX

[Hamish]

Hi,

I recently set up gpsd, cgpxlogger, and GpsDrive on a newish MacBook Pro
laptop (intel) running Mac OSX 10.4. It's all working nicely now. For the
archives I thought I'd share some notes and throw a few little wrapper
scripts out into the public domain.


1) install the MaxOSX XCode packages from install DVD, including X11, gcc4
2) install Fink, set to use unstable packages & update to latest base
3) install gpsdrive 2.09 using Fink (source package)
4) rename /sw/usr/bin/gpsd from GpsDrive package to 'gpsd-1.06b'
5) get gpsd 2.34 source code, expand

6) I tried using "stty" to set/read the NMEA stream from the OSX Terminal
prompt but no luck. stty on the Mac (& I assume *BSD) works differently
than the Linux version as given in the gpsd Readme. I couldn't get the
baud rate to change. The following didn't exit with error, but didn't
work either:  $ stty -f /dev/cu.KeySerial1 ispeed B4800

7) gpsd ./autogen. Just at the start there were some errors about
unmatched unary operators "[" etc; I assume that's something to do with
a shell test for [ "$FOO" -ne 0 ] when $FOO is unset, but it went on so
I left that. (sorry didn't write down the error)

8) that didn't find the lesstif includes installed via Fink (so it
wouldn't build xgps, etc apps), so I reran ./configure with 
-x-includes="/usr/X11R6/include /sw/include" to have it use Apple's X11
headers but also find the Fink lesstif stuff (same for -x-libraries).
But that broke during compile as make's gcc command line just threw in
the second path as another command line option; I assume some sort of $*
vs $@ whitespace quoting problem. I overcame that by making the string:
-x-includes="/usr/X11R6/include -I/sw/include" (same for -x-libraries=a -Lb).
Not pretty, but it worked. Also OSX doesn't have a /usr/local/ by
default so I opted to add --prefix=/sw to the ./configure line to have
it live in Fink's dir structure. After all that, I had everything but
gpxlogger building (something to do with DBUS), but I wasn't concerned
with that as cgpxlogger built ok and is a delight to use.

9) make gpsd load at boot time. Geordie suggested using the launchd
script from gpsdX, and that's probably the best Mac-friendly option, but
I'm not a mac-head so just whipped up a /etc/rc.local (as suggested by
Chris). that contains a single line: "/usr/local/bin/go_gpsd" The
go_gpsd launch script is attached to this email. It tests to see if a
KeySpan or PL2303 based usb<->serial adapter is present before deciding
what device to use. If neither is attached it doesn't try to start gpsd.

10) at this point GpsDrive works; fetch some maps from GpsDrive SVN,
Google Maps via the JavaScript wget generator, and slice up some local
GeoTIFF images for backdrops. (details in the GpsDrive wiki). Start it
from a OSX Terminal (if not in X11 already) with "open-x11 gpsdrive".

11) Set up cgpxlogger for easy start&stop with an auto unique timestamp
filename. Scripts to launch the GPX logger and watch its progress are
attached.

12) Set up the X11 Applications menu to make running these really easy.
com.apple.x11.plist contains:  (string'd)
GpsDrive             /sw/bin/gpsdrive
xGps                 /sw/bin/xgps -speedunits knots
xGpsSpeed            /sw/bin/xgpsspeed -speedunits knots
Start GPX logger     /usr/local/bin/go_cgpxlogger
Monitor GPX logfile  xterm -geometry 50x30 -e /usr/local/bin/mon_cgpxlogger
Stop GPX logger      killall cgpxlogger


in the hope that it will be useful,
Hamish
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