So, I’ve discovered an issue with my GPSD + NTPD setup: It refuses to set the time on start, because the time is too far off (now doesn’t that just suck!). So, I needed to find a way to set this automatically, using the data from GPSD. This really only needs to be run once, then I can trust NTPD to keep things up to date. I found this script , however setting it up requires installing HALF OF CPAN. So, I came up with a really awful hack to do this instead:

GPSDATE=`gpspipe -w | head -10 | grep TPV | sed -r 's/.*"time":"([^"]*)".*/\1/' | head -1`
echo $GPSDATE
date -s "$GPSDATE"

So, my rc.local looks like this now:

date -s '01/01/2011 00:01'
sleep 1
/usr/sbin/gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0 -n
sleep 6
GPSDATE=`gpspipe -w | head -10 | grep TPV | sed -r 's/.*"time":"([^"]*)".*/\1/' | head -1`
echo $GPSDATE
date -s "$GPSDATE"
sleep 3
/usr/bin/ntpd

It seems that you need the time to be somewhat close before you can get accurate results from GPSD. Being in the same decade seems to help.