To save heartache with a Garmin Forerunner 205/305 on Debian

As you will have discovered Garmin have NO support for Linux so their Windoze only plugin doesn't work with Linux at all (even under Wine.... don't bother.... you'll never get that portion of your life back)

No....I'm afraid the only way to weld a Garmin Forerunner 205/305 (and others probably) into your lovely shiny Debian Linux is to do the following :-

( I apologise for laying it out "idiot's guide" style but you have to appreciate not everybody is an old code monkey)

go to this gentleman's website here and download either the Debian 386 or AMD64 bit deb file depending on your particular flavour and install it (Lucid is about the closest to Debian Squeeze)..... right click on the deb file and install with gdebi (it's quick and dirty and works)

Then once you've done that you'll need to do some semi scary stuff..... open a terminal as root or sudo/su once you're in the terminal and type or copy and paste :-

(red for filenames blue for content of files)

nano /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules

once the file comes up cut and paste this into its first line

SYSFS{idVendor}=="091e", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"

(this has been deprecated so it "may" suddenly stop working on an update)

(also add yourself to the "plugdev" group later)

saved it by pressing "Ctrl O then Ctrl X" and you should drop back to terminal prompt

cut and paste this into the terminal 

nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

enter at the bottom of that file (or new line if nothing is in the file) the following 


# prevent garmin_gps from being loaded 
blacklist garmin_gps


save it (see above)

shutdown & reboot, plug in garmin forerunner 205/305 

go here and test it works or here
Enjoy