After exchanging emails with Iain Holmes it turns out the restriction on building the application on Fedora was an experiment gone wrong. Iain has made an new Gypsy release (0.6) and I’ve built new packages:
Use these rather than the ones linked from my previous blog post.
Updated 10th November 2008 – Gypsy is now available from the Fedora Project. You should be able to install using either PackageKit or YUM.
Iain Holmes has written an application called Gypsy that multiplexes access to a GPS receiver connected to your computer. Debian/Ubuntu packages for Gypsy are available, so I decided I would have a go at building RPMs for Fedora 8. There are two packages available:
Install these using the normal RPM commands. Once you have the packages installed you should be able to follow Iains tutorial describing how to write a simple application that receives position updates from your GPS via Gypsy.
For those interested in what I did, you can get the SPEC file and the init script I created. You’ll notice that I’m building against subversion rather than the latest 0.5 release. This is because Iain has included a check for non-Debian system in the build scripts for the 0.5 release and it seemed simpler to build from subversion than to try and patch the released version. I’ve dropped Iain an email about my work and hopefully he’ll remove the Fedora restriction in the next release.
The OpenStreetMap project is all about making geographic information available under the same terms as we get access to the source code of Free Software. Many people will be surprised to learn that services such as Google and Yahoo maps may be free to access, but they has very draconian terms of use which mean that you are very limited in what you can do with their data. While many Governments collect and publish geographic data and maps under free access terms many do not. This is the case in the United Kingdom where the Ordnance Survey are the national mapping agency, but they ruthlessly enforce their copyright.
One of the things people want to do the with data collected by OpenStreetMap is to create maps! To help with this I’ve put together some packages and instructions for setting up your own web map server on Fedora. As the title of this post states I am largely build on the work of many in the Free GIS community.