Thursday, March 29, 2012

TomTom Home on Linux

Today I tried (again) to get my TomTom One GPS to connect to my linux system. And failed.

Experiment 1: Can the laptop's gpsd read the device as a dumb GPS?
Well, no. GPSD can't locate the device at all. I suspect that's because the TomTom One isn't GPS dongle, it's a full system on it's own. And it doesn't know to pass-through the raw GPS data to simulate a dongle.

Experiment 2: Can TomTome Home 2.8 (for controlling the device, uploading new maps, etc) be installed on Ubuntu 11.10?
No. The available TTH 2.8 clients are for Win and OSX only.

Experiment 3: Can TTH 2.8 be installed on Ubuntu 11.10 using Wine?
Sadly, no. The install itself went poorly. On several attempts, only one was successful. Due to two bugs (some custom jiggery in the TTH does in the Windows Registry, and a bug with Wine support for USB) the device cannot be recognized, loaded, or interacted with.

Experiment 4: Can TTH 2.8 be installed on Ubuntu 11.10 using a Virtual Machine?
Yes. I use a Virtualbox XP VM. TTH 2.8 installed perfectly first time. The device, like all USB devices in VB, must be manually added in the VB 'Device" menu. After that, control of the device was perfect.