[Xastir] VMWare Ubuunto - Getting GPS to work on MacBookPro

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 08:36:06PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <nwsnowboarder at verizon.net> flavor, containing:
> Last weekend my hard drive failed on my Mac.  I did have it backed up, 
> but Xastir won't work off the back-up.  I was using the last compiled 
> version that Dana had posted a couple of years ago.
> 
> I decided to go the VMWare route and installed it last night.  Installed 
> the Prolific USB driver on my Mac and am able to monitor the GPS data 
> stream on the Mac.
> 
> In VMWare I enabled the USB Serial under settings.
> 
> In Xastir I set-up the interface for the GPS as /dev/cu.usbserial which 
> is how I had it set-up running native on the the Mac and this didn't 
> work.  I set up another Serial GPS using the default settings and it 
> comes up, but there is no GPS data, i.e. no satellites or fix.

There are some notes about adding virtual serial ports to the VM, but nothing
Mac specific.  From the VM side, the device won't be called cu.usbserial, it'll
be /dev/ttyS[0-9]  (i.e. will appear to be a real serial port to the VM).

You'll have to hack the VM configuration file to tie the real USB serial 
connection to the virtual serial port.  There are some notes about doing that
in the "HowTo:VMware" wiki page, but they're Windows-oriented (so they reference
"COM1" and "COM2" rather than /dev/cu.usbserial or whatever.  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
  In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. 
                                  -- Ineffective daily affirmation