Gebabbel is a Qt4.3 Frontend for the famous gpsbabel, a tool to convert GPS file formats back and forth. Gebabbel wraps the complexity of gpsbabel in a (hopefully) easy to use graphical user interface.
As of 20070712 Gebabbel is available as 0.3 beta. It's the third release of Gebabbel.
As of 20071104 a binary for Linux is provided. Use it if you get crashes when running Gebabbel on a Ubuntu box.
Help needed: The aforementioned crash appears on Ubuntu systems when compiling Gebabbel against the shipped version of Qt4. After starting Gebabbel, adding or editing items in the main lists will crash the application. It won't crash if I compile Qt4 by myself and build Gebabbel against it.
Due to the fact that I'm a hobbyist, I have no clue what actually happens. If you are more familiar with debugging, your help to hunt the bug mentioned above is much appreciated.
This release includes:
For Linux users, source code is provided. For Macintosh 10.4.x users (both Intel and PPC platforms), binaries are provided. A windows binary will be provided as soon as the beta stabilises.
If you want it to appear in your mother tongue, you should translate it. Please contact me at christeck add users dodd sourceforge dodd net.
Here are some preview screenshots of Gebabbel. First one taken from the main development platform, a Gentoo Linux driven box:
Though the main development platform is Linux, Gebabbel also runs on Mac OS X 10.4 (sorry, no prebuilt binary for Mac OS 10.3.9 available). The provided archive contains a universal binary that will run on both PowerPC-Macs as well as on Intel-Macs:
Gebabbel runs on Windows (Vista, XP, 2000 and ME) as well. All credits to Trolltech for their amazing cross platform Qt4 classes:
Gebabbel runs on a Nokia N810 if Qt4 is installed. All credits to Trolltech for their amazing cross platform Qt4 classes:
The releases 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3 are available via the download pages of Sourceforge.net
For Macintosh and Windows, binaries are provided:
If you want to compile from the source, you need a development environment (compiler) installed:
Additionally, you need Qt 4.3 installed. Most Linux distros offer Qt4 devel packages. On the Mac, you need to download it from trolltech.com and compile it yourself. For Windows, Trolltech.com offers an easy to use installer, which also downloads and installes mingw if desired.
What does the funny name of this application mean?
'Gebabbel' is german for "babble". It sounds similar to "gpsbabel" and even has a similar meaning :)
Will Gebabbel run on Mac OS X 10.3.9?
Perhaps, if you manage to compile Qt 4.3 and Gebabbel from source. I failed, and that's why I'm not able to provide a binary. If you can contribute a binary for Mac OS X 10.3.9, please contact me as christeck add users dodd sourceforge dodd net.
I used the button 'Restore Defaults' in the preferences. Thus I lost some very important presets. Are they really gone?
Gebabbel tries to create a backup of your config when before restoring the defaults. See the preferences dialog to check the directory containing your configs. Visit this folder and it's likely that you'll find your old config. Open it in a text editor and paste the command into the Gebabbel command line.
Gebabbel crashes during startup, when I select a preset, when I try to open the command line or when I pressed the process button. What can I do?
Please send me your configuration file and the name of the preset you want to use so I can debug it.
The filter config window simply sucks. Wouldn't it be cool to have a much improved filter config window for each filter type?
Yes, it would. But in this version, it is as it is.
Isn't it a security leak providing statically linked binaries?!?
Yes, it is, but it is convenient for the user, and the security problem is minor. Note that Gebabbel users aren't necessarily computer geeks. If you care about the (wee small) security issue, compile Gebabbel from source using a recent version of Qt 4.3
Trying to up- or download data from a gps device on Linux doesn't seem to work. Are there any known issues?
Gebabbel uses gpsbabel in the background. gpsbabel tries to access the device using libusb. There are two reasons why gpsbabel cannot access the device. When plugging the device, your machine probably loads the kernel module garmin_gps which now owns the device. gpsbabel now has no chance to access it. The solution is to unload the module. It is recommended to reconfigure your machine's hotplug system so it doesn't load the module garmin_gps when you plug in the device.
A further point of failure is that you are not allowed to access the device as a normal user. The solution is to grant the user the rights. Here are the both commands to be executed as superuser root to probably resolve your problem temporarily:
rmmod garmin_usb
chmod o+rwx /proc/bus/usb -R
Read more about gpsbabel and hotplugging on the Gpsbabel Homepage.