GPS software for Linux computer systems

Mapping and Navigation software for Linux

Writing GPS software is a good exercise for Linux programmers. Here are some examples.

GpsDrive is a car (bike, ship, plane) navigation system. GpsDrive displays your position provided from your NMEA capable GPS receiver on a zoomable map, the map file is auto selected depending of the position and preferred scale. Speech output is supported if the "festival" software is running. The maps are auto selected for best resolution depending of your position and can be downloaded from Internet. All Garmin GPS receiver with a serial output should be usable, also other GPS receiver which supports NMEA protocol. GpsDrive GPS software is written in C with use of the GTK+ graphic toolkit and runs with Linux and FreeBSD.

qpeGPS is a GPS software program for displaying a moving map centered at the position read from a GPS device. It's an open source project aimed at users of Linux PDA's. As of now, qpeGPS should be able to run under any Qtopia based device. Generally that would be Compaq Ipaq running familiar or Openzaurus(iPAQ H3100, H3600, H3700, H3800 series) and Sharps Zaurus' (SL-C700, SL-5600/SL-B500, SL-5000D/SL-5500) running SharpROM or OpenZaurus.

RoadMap is a GPS software program that provides a car navigation for Linux and UNIX. It displays a map of the streets, tracks the position provided by a NMEA-compliant GPS receiver, identifies the street matching this GPS position and announces the name of the crossing street at the next intersection. A rudimentary trip feature allows RoadMap to display some basic navigation information (distance to the destination, direction, speed, etc..). Voice messages are generated that duplicate some of the screen information. It is possible to display a specific area by providing a (complete or incomplete) postal address, the intersection of two streets or an exact position (longitude / latitude). The map files used by RoadMap are generated from the TIGER files provided by the US Census Bureau, and thus cover the USA only. The RoadMap map format is a binary format that is sensitive to the endianness of the processor. Maps available on this site cover all the USA and have been generated for a little endian processor (such as the Intel Pentium and StrongARM processors).

GPS3d is a set of utilities that lets you manipulate your GPS from your Linux box. One nice feature is the ability to view GPS data (track, waypoints, fix, etc.) on an OpenGL, 3D texture-mapped model of Earth. It also includes a generic serial port broadcaster daemon than can be used to multiplex access to any serial device (clock, gps, etc.) over the Internet. Finally, this GPS software can dynamically download maps from Mapblast and map them onto the 3D model of the Earth. GPS3d is ported to Mac OS X and Linux.

pygps, a Python GPS software program, records a track, records notes, shows you satellites, shows you your position, shows you on a map, runs on any machine which supports Python, pygtk, and libglade. Downloads maps from TerraServer on the fly.

gpsd is a service daemon that monitors a GPS attached to a host computer through a serial or USB port, making its data on the location/course/velocity of the sensor available to be queried on TCP port 2947 of the host computer. With gpsd, multiple GPS client applications (such as navigational and wardriving software) can share access to a GPS 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 and a Python module that developers of gpsd-aware applications can use to encapsulate all communication with gpsd. A project page can be found at http://gpsd.berlios.de/

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