It’s been almost 2 and half years since I originally posted about GPSd and OS X. That post got quite a bit of traffic for a while, but a whole lot has changed since then. If you’re interested in some in-depth background information, you should check out the old post; this post is mostly about the changes in the GPSd project since then, and the process of getting it running on OS X.

Two and a half years ago, GPSd had just released version 2.38. The latest version, which I just downloaded, is 2.96. Most significantly, GPSd has updated their communication protocol from a simple character-command format to one based on JSON-packed data. Further, they’ve built a significant portion of the project around python, and consequently built better python interfaces into the project.

OS X has also been updated, from whatever 10.5.x was current three Januaries ago, to 10.6.8. Luckily, the under-the-hood changes that Snow Leopard brought to the table should only make compiling software easier.

Building GPSd is a whole lot easier than it was the last time I went through all of this. I downloaded the latest source package (from http://prdownload.berlios.de/gpsd/gpsd-2.96bis.tar.gz). The bundled INSTALL file lists only python and py-gtk2 as dependencies, which makes compilation easy, given that python comes bundled with OS X. Although py-gtk2 is available through MacPorts (using sudo port install py-gtk2) I chose to avoid install the ridiculously long list of dependencies that it requires, as it is only required for the graphical test client (xgps), and GPSd also ships the perfectly functional command-line tool cgps, which provides the same information, albeit in a more sparse manner.

The actual build process is surprisingly easy: I ran ./configure –x-includes=/usr/X11R6/include, as suggested by the INSTALL file. As this indicated no issues, I ran make and sudo make install, which ran without a hitch, and gave me a working set of gps tools.

At this point it is possible for me to attach my GPS (see my old post for information about getting devices up and running), run gpsd -n /dev/cu.usbserial, and then use cgpsto get coordinates, date, and satellite information. However, this isn’t everything — all of the python based GPSd tools, such as gpsprof, still don’t work. This is because of Apple’s slightly special python distribution — while GPSd’s sudo make install puts python modules into /usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/, they need to be in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/. Instead of having to install these manually, you can use the bundled python install script to put the modules in the correct path by running sudo python setup.py install (thanks to http://docs.python.org/install/index.html).

Now that I have the most recent GPSd up and running I’m hoping to do some fun things with it. If I do, you’ll see it here!