USB to Serial Adapter for Ubuntu

I recently received an updated laptop at work -- a nice hp nc6400 notebook. Unlike the previous nc6000, this new on does not include a serial port which is problematic for the Garmin to serial cable I have. I ordered from CompUSA a USB to Serial Adapter by CablesToGo (model 26886) and it works great out of the box on Ubuntu/Feisty.

All I needed to change is the serial port to use, so:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyS0 -o kml,points=0,line_color=ff0000ff -F waypoints.kml
gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyS0 -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx

becomes:

gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o kml,points=0,line_color=ff0000ff -F waypoints.kml
gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F waypoints.gpx

FWIW, it uses the pl2303 kernel module.

gpicsync on Ubuntu/Feisty

GPicSync is a very nice cross-platform tool to match up photos with GPS locations. However it requires a package that isn't included by default by Ubuntu/Feisty.

1. Download GPicSync from http://code.google.com/p/gpicsync/

2. Unpack it: tar zxf Linux-GPicSync-0.91.tar.gz

3. Move to the directory it created: cd Linux-GPicSync-0.91

4. Set the GUI and command line versions of the program executable: chmod +x gpicsync-GUI.py gpicsync.py

5. Install the Ubuntu/Feisty package python-wxgtk2.8 which provides the python bindings for the wx library and the exiftool: sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 libimage-exiftool-perl

6. Run the program and start geotagging photos: ./gpicsync-GUI.py

Building F-Spot from source on Ubuntu

The instructions How to Build F-Spot from HEAD are mostly correct for Ubuntu/Edgy and Ubuntu/Feisty, but leave out a number of packages that need to be installed before autogen.sh is run.

Be sure to also install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install mono-devel \
libglib2.0-dev libmono-dev libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil \
libexif-dev libgnomeui-dev liblcms1-dev libgphoto2-2-dev \
libusb-dev

And instead of make install, use make -k install since it will attempt to run scrollkeeper which attempts to update /var/lib/scrollkeeper/scrollkeeper_docs.

The offending line is: scrollkeeper-update -p /var/lib/scrollkeeper -o /home/marc/unstable/f-spot/share/omf/f-spot