I recently decided to try to get my handheld Garmin GPS reciever working with my laptop running Ubuntu Linux.
The most helpful thing I found online to make this work was http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=642999
sudo modprobe garmin_gps
sudo mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb/
sudo gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0
xgps