What is GPS

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a worldwide radio-navigation system formed from a constellation of 24 satellites and their ground stations.
GPS uses these “man-made stars” as reference points to calculate positions accurate to a matter of meters. In fact, with advanced forms of GPS you can make measurements to better than a centimeter!
In a sense it's like giving every square meter on the planet a unique address.

GPS receivers have been miniaturized to just a few integrated circuits and so are becoming very economical. And that makes the technology accessible to virtually everyone.
These days GPS is finding its way into cars, boats, planes, construction equipment, movie making gear, farm machinery, even laptop computers.
We use gps to make a wireless lan map with kismet.

GpsDrive

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 autoselected depending of the position and prefered scale. Speech output is supported if the “festival” software is running. The maps are autoselected for best resolution depending of your position and can be downloaded from Internet. All Garmin GPS reveiver with a serial output should be usable, also other GPS receiver which supports NMEA protocol.

GpsDrive is written in C with use of the GTK+ graphic toolkit and runs with Linux and FreeBSD.

If you only have USB @ your Laptop like me and no serial port, this will help you GPS getting started:
type this
london:~# insmod usbserial
Using /lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/usbserial.o
usb.c: registered new driver serial
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4

london:~# insmod pl2303
Using /lib/modules/2.4.18/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.o
usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for PL-2303
pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adapter driver v0.9

Now plugin you GPS Device …
hub.c: USB new device connect on bus2/1, assigned device number 3
usbserial.c: PL-2303 converter detected
usbserial.c: PL-2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tty/0 for devfs)

Now your GPS Device is reachable via /dev/ttyUSB0.
It works fine for me. I configured GpsDrive with /dev/ttyUSB0 and it works …