Geoclue is a D-Bus geoinformation service. The goal of the Geoclue project is to make creating location-aware applications as simple as possible.
Geoclue is Free Software, licensed under GNU GPLv2+.
Geoclue comprises the following functionalities :
- WiFi-based geolocation (accuracy: in meters)
- GPS(A) receivers (accuracy: in centimeters)
- GPS of other devices on the local network, e.g smartphones (accuracy: in centimeters)
- 3G modems (accuracy: in kilometers, unless modem has GPS)
- GeoIP (accuracy: city-level)
- Static location source (reads location from a system-wide file)
WiFi-based geolocation makes use of Mozilla Location Service.
If geoclue is unable to find you, you can easily fix that by installing and running a simple app on your phone. For using phone GPS, you'll need to install the latest version of GeoclueShare app on your phone (currently, this is supported only on Android devices).
Geoclue was also used for (reverse-)geocoding but that functionality has been dropped in favour of the geocode-glib library.
Geoclue was started during the GNOME Summit 2006 in Boston. At least Keith Preston and Tuomas Kuosmanen can be blamed. There was a total rewrite after version 0.9.
There was yet another rewrite that we call geoclue2. The first version to introduce the re-write was version 1.99.
- Discussions take place on the GNOME Discourse.
- The IRC chat for geoclue is on #gnome-maps at irc.gimp.org .
- Issues are tracked on Gitlab.
The source code is available as a tar-ball and in a Git repository.
For latest release tarballs, use the Download option of Gitlab on the
tag of your choice.
Older (than 2.4.13) releases are available here.
Git repository for Geoclue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/geoclue/geoclue
The guidelines for building geoclue have been documented here.