Known problems
The list of known problems (on 5 February 2002) is:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 8.3 or later.
- in older Tcl/Tk versions, neither map
background images
nor waypoint symbols
are saved to Postscript along the
other map information. Upgrading to a more recent Tcl/Tk is highly
recommended.
- due to limitations imposed by Tcl/Tk, that does not
implement communication with serial ports on Macintosh
platforms, GPSMan
will not be able to dialog with the GPS receiver on these
systems.
GPSMan User Manual
©Miguel
Filgueiras,
mig_at_ncc.up.pt, DCC-FC & LIACC,
Universidade do Porto, 2002
