Bluetooth GPS Fedora howto

 
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 {
# Automatically bind the device at startup
bind yes;

# Bluetooth address of the device
device 00:12:EE:55:00:FF;

# RFCOMM channel for the connection
channel	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 -y tangogps gpsdrive gpsbabel
 

Now just start tangogps and gpsdrive and enjoy...