A new version of GPSBabel – version 1.4.2 came out but it’s not yet in the Ubuntu repositories and there are no binaries on the GPSBabel
site.
I’m here to tell you that installing from the source worked pretty painlessly for me – I was surprised, a testament to the GPSBabel team – but I still felt pretty proud. Information taken from here.
This was how:
- Make sure you have libexpat-dev, if not,
$ sudo apt-get install expat libexpat-dev - You should have libusb but if not,
$ sudo apt-get install libusb-dev - Download the tar ball from here
- Extract the tar ball (right click and ‘Extract Here’)
- Open a terminal and cd to that newly created directory (this was on my desktop, where my downloaded files go as default from Firefox)
- type
$ ./configure && make - after a screen-full of code, if you were successful, like me, there will be a gpsbabel binary in the current folder
Your system will still use the old gpsbabel (if you’re upgrading), until you do the following. Rename (or if you’re feeling brave, delete) the
old gpsbabel in /usr/bin like so:
- In a terminal, cd to /usr/bin:
$ cd /usr/bin - Rename the current gpsbabel:
$ sudo mv gpsbabel gpsbabel_old - Move the new gpsbabel into this directory:
$ sudo mv ~/Desktop/gpsbabel-1.4.2/gpsbabel /usr/bin/ - If you now access the gpsbabel help with
$ gpsbabel --help | less
you should see ‘GPSBabel Version 1.4.2. https://www.gpsbabel.org’ at the top
Congratulations! You’ve updated to the latest GPSBabel