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Revision as of 13:51, 22 October 2008 by Valent (talk | contribs)

If you have bluetooth GPS dongle that you have laying around, or can borrow one from somebody, and like driving a bike or a car around then this is the guide for you.


You need to have bluetooth wireless chip already installed on your laptop. If you have a laptop or a desktop without bluetooth you can buy and use USB bluetooth dongle.


You can check if you have a bluetooth and that it is working correctly using this command:

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 this 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 catch 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 {

  1. Automatically bind the device at startup

bind yes;

  1. Bluetooth address of the device

device 00:12:EE:55:00:FF;

  1. RFCOMM channel for the connection

channel 1;

  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