Well guys I have learned to love kismet as with my laptop the windows drivers say the AP still is there 4 miles away However I got this new Magellan eXplorist 210 which comes with a USB cable, it spits out NMEA 2.1 though the USB cable in windows and assigns it to COM4 though some type of USB to serial emulation.

So is this possible in linux? Doing a lsusb outputs "Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0b20:0406 TransDimension, Inc." which is my GPS. However looking at dmesg it only finds the new device, but does not assgn it to /dev/ttyUSB0 or anything.

So far I have usbserial as a module and have it loaded when I plug the GPS in. Am I missing anything and just incase you ask why I don't use a USB to serial, because my laptop only has USB ports

Thanks

you could try plugging it in, then
cat /proc/bus/usb/devices
get the vendor and product of the device, then
modprobe usbserial vendor=0x???? product=0x????
you might then get a /dev/tty???? though I dont know what that would be exactly

any help?
tobyl

Here is the section of /proc/bus/usb/devices that is my gps

T: Bus=04 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 2 Spd=12 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 1.10 Cls=02(comm.) Sub=02 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=0b20 ProdID=0406 Rev= 1.00
S: Manufacturer=Thales Navigation
S: Product=Magellan eXplorist
C:* #Ifs= 2 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr= 20mA
I: If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=02(comm.) Sub=02 Prot=01 Driver=(none)
E: Ad=83(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS= 16 Ivl=10ms
I: If#= 1 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=0a(data ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=(none)
E: Ad=01(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 32 Ivl=0ms
E: Ad=82(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 32 Ivl=0ms

And after plugging in my GPS to the USB dmesg shows up

"usb 4-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2"

Now I try

"modprobe usbserial vendor=0x0b20 product=0x0406"

After I do that I get this from DMESG

usbcore: registered new driver usbserial
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
usbserial_generic 4-1:1.0: generic converter detected
usbserial_generic 4-1:1.0: Generic device with no bulk out, not allowed.
usbserial_generic: probe of 4-1:1.0 failed with error -5
usbserial_generic 4-1:1.1: generic converter detected
usb 4-1: generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usbcore: registered new driver usbserial_generic
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core

Then I try to cat /dev/ttyUSB0 and it just sits there hanging until i do CTRL-C, but I need to let my GPS get a fix and see what happens.

Thanks

hmm, looks like it was only partially successful in connecting.
Unless someone else here can help, I think you may need to get on a linux kernel/usb mailing list or somesuch.
Try reading the Documentation/usb/serial.txt from the kernel, the maintainer of the driver may be interested.
Or perhaps you can get some sort of port emulator for the laptop?
tobyl

Doing this with my serial GPS does the same thing, the only way I can get any output from it is with gpsd.