Downloading GPSManProgramsCurrent versionKnown problems

Known problems

The list of known problems (on 7 December 2004) is:

     
  1. GPSMan relies on the use of a serial port to communicate with the GPS receiver. Some Tcl/Tk installations (e.g., in SuSe, Red Hat and Mandrake Linux distributions), operating system drivers and even hardware (in some laptops) were reported not to work correctly with the serial port. Namely, the Tcl error: "bad option -mode" is a problem of bad configuration of the Tcl/Tk installation and upgrading to a newer version normally solves the problem. To help debugging input from a serial port a Tcl/Tk program is available from the WWW page. It must be edited before use to set the correct path to the serial port.
  2. GPSMan support for Garmin receivers may need to convert between bytes and floating point numbers. Tcl/Tk has no machine-independent way to do these conversions and GPSMan only implements them for little- or big-endian architectures that follow the IEEE floating point standard. Some Garmin receivers do not use protocols having floating point numbers and are not affected by this.
  3. GPSMan releases 5.3 and later cannot be run under Tcl/Tk 8.0 due to bugs in the latter. The recommended version of Tcl/Tk is 8.4.
  4. Tcl/Tk 8.4 conflicts with the Img library versions below 1.3, making it impossible to load/save images in formats other than GIF and PNM.
  5. due to limitations imposed by Tcl/Tk, that does not implement communication with serial ports on some Macintosh platforms, GPSMan will not be able to dialog with the GPS receiver on these systems. See below for information on how to use a USB port under MacOS X.

GPSMan User Manual
©Miguel Filgueiras, mig_at_ncc.up.pt, DCC-FC & LIACC, Universidade do Porto, 2004

Downloading GPSManProgramsCurrent versionKnown problems