broken screen: how to auto-turn FR into bluetooth/USB GPS?

Herve5.freerunner at ouvaton.org Herve5.freerunner at ouvaton.org
Tue Nov 4 10:54:01 CET 2008


Last week I lived an atrocious adventure: a small crease appeared on my
Freerunner screen, and within days it turned into an enormous break... Now
the sensitive part of the screen is almost uneffective, which in other
words means the (three weeks old) FR is unusable...

Until I am rich again, one path I see to still get something out of it is
to have it turned into an "ordinary" GPS that would connect either via
bluetooth or USB to a small laptop, where an openstreetmap-related viewer
would run.

I have found on the wiki some instructions to do this, at
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_GPS , but I am not sure they
aren't obsolete (same page says "gpsd is obsolete"...) and also given the
evolution of my touchscreen I need some automatic process that in
principle would not need the screen at all.

Is there a simple way (script?) to
- automatically turn on bluetooth upon startup (and turn off GSM as we are
at it)
- automatically start GPS and configure it to "answer bluetooth" as such?

Or the same through USB, which may be even better (I wouldn't have to pair
the laptop)?

Knowing that
- the laptop would be linux-based (Mandriva)
- on the Freerunner I currently have the latest FDOM distribution (but I
could reflash to whatever you suggest)
- I am using Mandriva and FR more out of political decisions than geek
competence: consider I am indeed quite a newbie, and the more step-by-step
your advice will be, the better it'll be to get me out of despair ;-)

TIA!
Hervé




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