I finally got around to browsing the forums and was delighted to find a thread that didn't assume everyone runs Windows (or a Mac). I realize that many of these posts are a coupla years old; do many folks today still need to run a Windows box (real or virtual) or Wine just to handle their geocaching needs? If so, could you give me some idea what those needs are? I get the impression there's a whole world of features that everyone but me knows about and uses.
I run Kubuntu, recently upgraded to the latest version 10.04LTS Lucid Lynx (well, I run Debian stable on servers but that's not where I do my geocaching-related stuff).
I have a Garmin Colorado 400t which is the only GPSr I've used so far for hiking/caching; I also own a TomTom ONE XLS for road navigation. As an aside, I only recently learned that my Colorado can do road routing, but it's not nearly as good at it as the TomTom, nor does it offer me any choices for adjusting the route, as far as I can tell.
What works for me: I connect the Colorado to a USB port and it mounts as a removable disk under /media/GARMIN/. I download GPX files from geocaching.com and place them in /media/GARMIN/Garmin/GPX/. I unmount and off I go. Upon my return, I fire up Viking and open my master file that already has various map layers and records of all my past tracks and waypoints. I connect the GPSr and append the file /media/GARMIN/Garmin/GPX/Current/Current.gpx, which appears as a "track and waypoint layer" (after this I can unmount the GPSr if I wish). As the name implies, this shows me all recent tracks and waypoints, which I can view on various maps as well as drag-and-drop into my organized list of travels. I then delete the Current.gpx layer and save my master file.
Besides saving a record of my tracks and waypoints, I also use Viking to generate waypoints (for example, many geocache descriptions give coordinates for parking but don't include them as a waypoint in the GPX file, so I have to create it myself), which I can export as a GPX file and place into /media/GARMIN/Garmin/GPX/ like any other.
Viking doesn't really have much concept of geocaches, as distinct from waypoints, and ignores all the extra descriptive information in a geocache's GPX file, but then all I really want for my own records is the location.
I understand I could use Open Cache Manager or GeoToad to "manage" my geocaches, and no doubt I will once I figure out what that means, specifically.
Oh, wait, there is one thing I can't do. Thanks to the manufacturers' contempt for non-Windows users, I do need to find a Windows box in order to update the maps and software on the GPSr itself--this is true for both the TomTom and the Garmin.
So what am I missing? What do you all do with geocache information that requires apps that run only on Windows?
And one more question: is it generally true of all GPSr's that, when plugged into a USB port, they appear as a removable disk, so I can transfer files in both directions to (a) load cache data and waypoints into the device and ( fetch tracks from the device? I'm specifically wondering whether this is true of the DeLorme PN series, but any info would help.
