Guide for using garmin Forerunner 205/305 GPS unit with Ubuntu

[nickmcg]

Thanks for the guide. Unfortunately I've fallen at the first hurdle.
When I try to unpack sporttracks-2.1.3478.tar.gz, I get

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data--crc error
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Any advice?

Thanks

Nick

Fixed: Renamed sporttracks-2.1.3478.tar.gz to sporttracks-2.1.3478.tar.zip, then archive manager worked (Ubuntu 10.04)

[Richard Mathie]

use pytrainer instead as you don't have to mess about with mono, and its quite good

can you link to the gpsbable patch/ discussion on courses, they have been really slow with this. I tried to get my head around http://code.google.com/p/garmintools/ but I am not experienced enough to write my own,

[Richard Mathie]

The latest gpsbabel now works for uploading gps tracks to the watch as a course! apparently a guy called Martin Buck is responsible for getting it to work, well done him!

download the latest release
http://www.gpsbabel.org/download.html

make sure you have build essentials and libusb-dev

sudo apt-get build-essentials libusb-dev

navigate in a terminal to the downloaded file and do the usual

tar -xvf gpsbabel.tar.gz
cd gpsbabel*
./configure
make
sudo make install

and now i can upload courses with

gpsbabel -i gpx -f 1.gpx -t -o garmin -F usb:

[somhi]

I can not compile gpsbabel under ubuntu 10.04 due to an error,
something like "ld: cannot find -lexpat"


Anyway, this post is fantastic, many thanks to all of you, but I found left something: Is there a way in Linux to delete/rename tracks and waypoints from my Forerunner?

Cheers

[Peter Sixsmith]

Hi All

I have recently installed Ubuntu so i am completely new to this operating system.

I have installed pytrainer and wish to synchronise my Forerunner 305.

When I connect the 305 pytrainer does not seem to see it.

When I try to import using GPSBabel I get the following error - Must be using 1.3.5 of GPSBabel for this plug in.

When I try to import using Garmin tools I get the following error - Cannot find gamintools binaries.

Please can somebody help or point me in the right direction.

Peter - A Ubuntu learner

[pabc]

you have installed gpsbabel and garmintools? I'm in 10.04 and the latest version is 1.3.6

open a terminal and type

sudo apt-get install gpsbabel garmin-forerunner-tools

then type in your password (you wont see it on the screen) - the apps will install. once done type

gpsbabel -V

and it will report the version you are using. Then try again with pytrainer.

However - I would recommend taking the effort to use sporttracks as it is much more powerful (but a little more complicated to set up on ubuntu)

[Richard Mathie]

gpsbabel 1.4.1 and later support uploading tracks and coerces, as the latest isn't in the repository you have to download and install the latest from here: http://www.gpsbabel.org/download.html

1.3.6 doesn't upload cources.

that error message means you don't have one of the required libraries, you can search for it, and each error which comes up, expat is an XML Parser, so install the expatlib and dev files to compile

sodo apt-get install libexpat1 libexpat1-dev

alternatively installing the gpsbabel from the repositorys should resolve the dependencies, you just need to make sure you use your gpsbabel you made is the one being called on the command line. here

whereis gpsbabel

and

PATH/gpsbabel -V

can be used to see if the right binary is being used. If the version dose not match the version you compiled try overwriting it for example with

sudo cp /usr/local/bin/gpsbabel /usr/bin/gpsbabel

also if you know how you could modify your search path to pick up the correct binary.