GPS device missing in debian

[Chris Jenks]

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008, Joachim Breitner wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Manual_Debian is still of interest to people who, well, want to do it
> manually, or learn more about the system. But if it confuses people then
> yes, go ahead and delete it.
>
> Greetings,
> Joachim

   It seems useful to me. Maybe enlarge the disclaimer at the top? I hate 
to get rid of any resource that might help me avoid bugging the generous 
people here.
   Regarding the gps device, I noticed that occasionally when I cat 
/dev/ttySAC1 I get little snippets of text, like "$GPZDA,,,,,00," and 
",,,,,,99.99,99.9", although I usually get nothing. I was surprised in 
2008.8 when cat /dev/ttySAC1 kept listing output as it was generated - 
more like tail -f. However, tail -f /dev/ttySAC1 gives no output for 
debian.
   Is the driver module for the gps compiled into the kernel, or is it 
supposed to be loaded? My lsmod gives:

Module                  Size  Used by
rfcomm                 36692  0
l2cap                  21380  5 rfcomm
bluetooth              54880  4 rfcomm,l2cap
ipv6                  253796  18
ohci_hcd               22284  0
snd_soc_neo1973_gta02_wm8753     8200  0
snd_soc_s3c24xx_i2s     4120  1 snd_soc_neo1973_gta02_wm8753
snd_soc_s3c24xx         4736  1 snd_soc_neo1973_gta02_wm8753
snd_soc_wm8753         29376  1 snd_soc_neo1973_gta02_wm8753
snd_soc_core           27488  3 
snd_soc_neo1973_gta02_wm8753,snd_soc_s3c24xx,snd_soc_wm8753
snd_pcm_oss            40384  0
snd_mixer_oss          14976  1 snd_pcm_oss
snd_pcm                73733  3 snd_soc_s3c24xx,snd_soc_core,snd_pcm_oss
snd_timer              20388  1 snd_pcm
snd_page_alloc          6376  1 snd_pcm
snd                    46740  7 snd_soc_neo1973_gta02_wm8753,snd_soc_wm8753,
snd_soc_core,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer

   Thanks,

     Chris