canbus is a comunication system used mainly for automotive and industrial control systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller_Area_Network
just in case of "what on earth are you talking about" questions

need a diagnostic frontend for canbus systems. im using a usb dongle from kvaser, the drivers installed without much trouble (details below) and the test programs work ok. used a few scripts to extract data, now need to extract, select and lable fields, split data up, stick it together, ect.
over half of the hardware manufacturers i checked supplied linux drivers for their interfaces but i havent been able to find a frontend app for linux yet so im probably going to have try and write one. dont know much about programing, here is my chance to learn
does anyone know if anything like this exists already?
i would do something usefull by contributing to an existing project than create some slow, script based monstrosity that works for me but doesnt even give a foundation for further development. any pointers would be much appreciated.
cheers
stan

(kvaser leaf drivers on fc3.
in the source for the leaf driver the section to find the device minor number is commented out. it needs to be un-commented for hotplug and udev to work.
part of the install script runs "which depmod", which for some reason gives an error message on my system. ive probably messed something up but runing /sbin/depmod finishes the job. no other problems)