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In this HowTo you will learn how to connect external bluetooth GPS dongle and make it work on Fedora.
If you have bluetooth GPS dongle that you have laying around, or can borrow one from somebody, and would use GPS on Fedora laptop while you are driving a bike or a car around then this is the guide for you.
You need to have bluetooth wireless chip installed in your laptop or a bluetooth USB dongle. If you have a laptop or a desktop without bluetooth built it you should buy a USB bluetooth dongle.
Here are some images of bluetooth dongles if you haven't seen them before.
You can check with hcitool command that you have bluetooth device and that it is working correctly :
hcitool dev
Then let’s make sure you have bluetooth service running:
service bluetooth status
if it is not running just start it with:
service bluetooth start
Turn on your bluetooth GPS dongle and find its bluetooth mac address with hcitool command:
hcitool scan
Scanning …
00:1E:EE:00:11:22 LG KU990
00:02:78:99:FF:00 SJ GPS
00:12:EE:55:00:FF Device01
If you find more than one bluetooth device you should know the name of your GPS dongle. My GPS dongle has a “GPS” in its name so it is easy to spot its mac address: 00:02:78:99:FF:00 (SJ GPS)
You need to install gpsd and setup bluetooth config files, so let’s first install gpsd:
su -
yum install gpsd gpsd-clients -y
Then you need to edit bluetooth config file so that gpsd connects automatically to GPS bluetooth dongle.
gedit -etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf
and add these lines:
rfcomm0 {
# Automatically bind the device at startup
bind yes;
# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:12:EE:55:00:FF;
# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel 1;
# Description of the connection
comment “GPS Bluetooth dongle”;
}
After reboot check if you have /dev/rfcomm0 device with:
ls -al /dev/rfcomm0
If after reboot (or you don’t wan’t to reboot) you still don’t have /dev/rfcomm0 then just issue this command:
rfcomm bind rfcomm0
Now start gpsd daemon:
gpsd /dev/rfcomm0
Now you can start having fun! :)
Install gps applications like tangogps, gpsdrive and gpsbabel:
yum install tangogps gpsdrive gpsbabel