PolarNavy

Following an earlier post on using GPS under Ubuntu, I have been trying to get PolarNavy working under Ubuntu 12.10. Polar Navy is the only Linux chart navigation software available for Linux. I know people will correct me by quoting OpenCPN, but there are no charts currently legally available for the UK, at least that I could find.

Polar Navy has two components – PolarCOM which communicates with the GPS receiver, and PolarView which displays the actual charts. The two applications can connect together, to show the vessel’s current position.

I had Polar Navy working fine under Ubuntu 12.04 i386, but for some reason I had problems running under Ubuntu 12.10 amd64. The problem was that PolarCOM would simply not display the position, i.e. the Lat and Long. I tried running from the command line, and there were a large number of errors when running PolarCOM, for example:

GPS on Linux

GPS Receiver BU-353

I have bought myself a GPS Receiver BU-353.

Having plugged in the device into my Debian Wheezy workstation, I wanted to test that it was working.

A quick dmesg | tail showed me that the device has been found and installed correctly (no drivers required).