Garmin Forerunner 305 with GPSBabel and MyTourbook in Linux Ubuntu

After many years we had to say Goodby to pyTrainer, which was a perfect and simple tool at the same time, but did not work anymore on our Ubuntu machine after the last update. A couple of hours solved the situation and lead us to GPSBabel and MyTourBook. Both are phantastic tools with long history. The workflow needs to be adapted but looks fine, too.
This article will guide through the installation and how to load the tracks from your Garmin 305 device to the Linux Ubuntu PC. A workflow which is unfortunatelly not covered anymore by most recent sportwatches, since allmost all of them load all your data to some server in USA.
- Install GPSBabel
- Install Java
- Install mytourbook
- Load Tracks from Garmin Forerunner 305 with GPSBabel
Install GPSBabel
Quite simple from Linux Ubuntu Synaptic Package Manager as version gpsbable 1.5.4-2. There is nothig to explain …
Install OpenJDK 8
Open the terminal window to get the latest OpenJDK . It’s the runtime environment for Mytourbook:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk sudo update-alternatives --config java sudo update-alternatives --config javac
Install and start MyTourbook
- Download the latest MyTourbook.
- Unzip it and copy it to a directory you want to execute it from.
- Run mytourbook file in mytourbook directory as application
Load Tracks from Garmin Forerunner 305
Open the commandwindow and use this command to get all the tracks stored on your Garmin device in TCX format (Training Center XML):
gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb:0 -o gtrnctr -F my_runs.tcx
Once you have stored the tcx file on your machine you have to import it into MyTourbook and save it to the local(!) database of Mytourbook 🙂

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