How To Install gypsy-daemon on Ubuntu 18.04
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install gypsy-daemon on Ubuntu 18.04.
What is gypsy-daemon
gypsy-daemon is:
Gypsy is a GPS multiplexing daemon which allows multiple clients to access GPS data from multiple GPS sources concurrently.
Without some sort of multiplexing system, a GPS device can only safely be accessed by one client. In a server situation this may not cause any problems, but on modern desktop which could potentially have multiple location aware devices, this could be an issue.
Gypsy hides the tricky details of parsing NMEA from the client applications, passing the data as simple values for the clients to use.
Gypsy uses D-Bus to notify clients about location changes, sitting on the system bus, issuing signals as the GPS data changes. This design allows clients to only be notified about the changes they care about and ignore the rest. Gypsy has fine grained signals, so a client only interested in position changes will not be woken up for any other changes like, for example, satellite detail changes.
Gypsy is designed to be usable on all manner of systems, from low powered devices (such as Nokia N810 and Openmoko Neo) to regular high powered desktop systems. As the signals it emits are fine grained applications are woken up only when they absolutely need to be, keeping power requirements to a minimum.
Gypsy was designed to fix the numerous design flaws found in GPSD.
Included with Gypsy is libgypsy which is a GObject based C wrapper for the D-Bus API making writing clients very simple, although any language with D-Bus bindings can be used to write a Gypsy client (See simple-gps-python.py in the Gypsy sources for an example written in Python).
There are three methods to install gypsy-daemon on Ubuntu 18.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install gypsy-daemon Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install gypsy-daemon using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install gypsy-daemon
Install gypsy-daemon Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install gypsy-daemon using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install gypsy-daemon
Install gypsy-daemon Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install gypsy-daemon using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install gypsy-daemon
How To Uninstall gypsy-daemon on Ubuntu 18.04
To uninstall only the gypsy-daemon package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove gypsy-daemon
Uninstall gypsy-daemon And Its Dependencies
To uninstall gypsy-daemon and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 18.04, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove gypsy-daemon
Remove gypsy-daemon Configurations and Data
To remove gypsy-daemon configuration and data from Ubuntu 18.04 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge gypsy-daemon
Remove gypsy-daemon configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove gypsy-daemon configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge gypsy-daemon
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install gypsy-daemon package on Ubuntu 18.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.
