So near yet so far. I just got a eeePC 1000 Pearl with the SSD, and already had a Globalsat BU-303 (compatible with BU-353) USB GPS receiver puck. It might speak volumes about my comfort with Linux to add that I had this thing working fine on my Mac, and have read that other eeePC owners have gotten it to work. I've spent the last day or so googling and come up with some stuff, but it's still not working. I'm hoping to start a thread that will bring a lot of stuff together and both get this thing working, and help others who are trying to do similar things. The general idea is to use the eeePC for both navigating my way around Europe and geotagging my photos along the way. I leave in two days. I'm hoping those of you with much more eeeC, GPS, USB and especially Linux time might be willing to help me (and anyone who finds this via google) out. Right now I need help getting gpsd installed.

So Far:
*After unpacking and setting up the eeePC, I plugged in the GPS and the red indicator light on the GPS puck (or as some call it, the GPS mouse) came on as expected.

*I found out that GPSManager is a useful application, so I somehow managed to download and install that into Work/Accessories screen on the eeePC's standard interface Home button. If someone can fill in those steps from memory in a followup message, great. Otherwise I hope to go back through the stuff found online to type it into a followup comment.

Despite lots of futzing around with the Options and Receiver windows in GPSmanager, I couldn't get the GPS to show up.

*I found out that gpsd is used by most applications, and maybe this is also true of GPSmanager. To do that, you need to open a "terminal" console Linux command line window. Using the eeePC's standard Ctrl-Alt-T key combo works great, but lacks niceties like copy/paste so I was happy to discover that Home/Work/File Manager has in the Tools menu an Open Console Window option (Ctrl-T within File Manager) with lots of extras.

Two steps are recommended to install gpsd from within the console (where the active place you're typing has a ">" and after typing in the command you hit the Enter key):
> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get install gpsd

Neither of these steps works. The update returns these errors amid the blizzard of text:
  Err file: tmp/main Packages
  Failed to fetch file:/tmp/.7sJGSW8e/dists/tmp/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz  File not found
  W: Couldn't stat source package list file: tmp/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/_tmp_.7sJGSW8e_dists_tmp_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)

The install step returns these errors in a smaller blast of text:
  W: Couldn't stat source package list file: tmp/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/_tmp_.7sJGSW8e_dists_tmp_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
  W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
  E: Couldn't find package gpsd

My guess is that apt-get might connect with an Asus ftp site somewhere, and that either it's down (I've been seeing lots of glitches trying to browse their site) or they moved gpsd into a different file and forgot to tell whatever runs the apt-get update process. Yes, I checked via a browser window that my net connection was live before doing the two commands above.

This step of getting gpsd running is apparently my next challenge, so any and all help is appreciated.

Not one to give up when it seems so close, I discovered that there's a console command to show what's going on with the USB ports:
> dmesg

At the bottom of many lines are the two related to my having plugged in the GPS:
...] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 6
...] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

The next step took many hours that I'm hoping this post will save other people with USB devices. I discovered that there's a driver needed for the USB GPS, named pl2303 (note that's "PL" and not "P1" as in p one). Although the GPS was being seen as plugged into the USB port, it wasn't able to send its text strings to any GPS applications or utilities without that pl2303 driver installed. It turns out the driver was in the default eeePC packages, but needed to be installed. It's stashed way in the guts of the file system, and to get there you type a long "cd" change directory command (or much better use copy/paste, because one tiny typo and it won't work):
> cd /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/kernel/drivers/usb/serial

To complicate things, it's named pl2303.ko.huawei apparently because it's for a cellphone or something and the eeePC looks for something named pl2303.ko when you try to install it. So the first step is to make a copy with that name, using the "sudo" command (because otherwise you don't have permission to futz with this stuff) and the "cp" command to copy the file:
> sudo cp pl2303.ko.huawei pl2303.ko

Then after apt-get still wouldn't install pl2303 I found somewhere that there's another way to do it:
> sudo insmod /lib/modules/2.6.21.4-eeepc/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.ko

Presumably if your files are arranged differently, you'll need a different cp command but I can't help with that so maybe someone else could.

So now I did a new dmesg to see if it worked, and bingo:
> dmesg
...] pl2303 1-2:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
...] usb 1-2: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0

To reiterate then, right now no amount of experimenting with the Options and Receiver windows in GPSmanager, has given any indication that the GPS is communicating. In the Options tab of the large window, I changed the Serial to be ttyUSB0 (that's zero 0 not Oh O). No joy.

Help?