UbuntuGIS

Revision 41 as of 2006-06-18 16:26:25

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GIS = Geographical Information System

For users

Your Ubuntu Dapper is ready for daily GIS work.

Desktop GIS

You can find and easily install on your machine (through Synaptic or apt-get install program-name ) the following GIS applications:

  • GRASS (grass) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for geospatial data management and analysis, image processing, graphics/maps production, spatial modeling, and visualization. GRASS is currently used in academic and commercial settings around the world, as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies.

  • QuantumGIS (qgis) is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows. QGIS supports vector, raster, and database formats. QGIS is licensed under the GNU Public License. Some of the major features include:

    • Support for spatially enabled PostGIS tables
    • Support for shapefiles, Arc/Info coverages, Mapinfo, and other formats supported by OGR
    • Raster support for a large number of formats
    • Identify features
    • Display attribute tables
    • Select features
    • GRASS Digitizing
    • Feature labeling
  • Thuban (thuban) can read geographic data in the shapefile format. Main features of Thuban are the layer management and the possibility to navigate on the map, to control the visual appearance of objects, to identify and edit attributes by object selection and to print and export the resulting maps for further processing.

  • GMT (gmt). GMT is a free, public-domain collection of ~60 UNIX tools that allow users to manipulate (x,y) and (x,y,z) data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and produce Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots through contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views in black and white, gray tone, hachure patterns, and 24-bit color.

  • e00compr (e00compr) E00compr is an ANSI C library that reads and writes Arc/Info compressed E00 files. Both "PARTIAL" and "FULL" compression levels are supported. E00 files

are the vector import/export format for Arc/Info. It is plain ASCII and is meant as an interchange format. ESRI considers the format to be proprietary, so this package may not read all E00 files as ESRI may change the format. This package is useful for importing E00 files into the GRASS GIS system.

Web GIS

  • Mapserver (cgi-mapserver, mapserver-bin, perl-mapscript, php4-mapscript, php5-mapscript, python-mapscript) is an Open Source development environment for building spatially-enabled internet applications. Mapserver is not a full-featured GIS system, nor does it aspire to be. Instead, Mapserver excels at rendering spatial data (maps, images, and vector data) for the web. The Mapserver system includes Mapscript that allows popular scripting languages such as :

    • PHP provided by php4-mapscript and php5-mapscript
    • Python provided by python-mapscript.
    • Perl provided by perl-mapscript.
    • Java not provided actualy by those packages.

Under the hood : libraries

  • GDAL/OGR (libgdal1c2a) is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. It is used by most of the applications above

  • GEOS (libgeos2c2a) (Geometry Engine - Open Source) is a C++ port of the Java Topology Suite (JTS). As such, it aims to contain the complete functionality of JTS in C++. This includes all the OpenGIS "Simple Features for SQL" spatial predicate functions and spatial operators, as well as specific JTS topology functions such as IsValid().

  • PROJ.4 (proj) Cartographic Projections Library, originally written by Gerald Evenden then of the USGS.

Current versions

Application

Current version in Ubuntu Dapper

Latest stable version

Desktop GIS and stand-alone tools

GMT

4.0

4.1.3

GRASS

6.0.1

6.0.2

QuantumGIS

0.7.4

0.7.4

Thuban

1.0.0

1.0.1

e00compr

1.0.0

1.0.0

WebGIS

Mapserver

4.6.1

4.8.3

Libraries

GDAL

1.2.6

1.3.2

GEOS

2.1.4

2.2.2

PROJ.4

4.4.9

4.4.9



For developers

This is the page where suggestions and software lists for a professional "out of the box" Ubuntu based GIS workstation should be collected.

GIS software is used in a wide variety of businesses, ranging from waterworks over dispatch centers to archeologists, the target is, to build a nice platform for these people and to make ubuntu attractive to GIS ISVs

There exists a [http://pkg-grass.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl Debian-GIS project]. Packaging new software or updating existing packages should be coordinated with this project to not duplicate efforts. The Debian-GIS mailing list can be found at [http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-grass-general]

Please add software suggestions here or express your will to participate.

Most of the packages listed below can be found for download as either source or binary from the UbuntuGIS project on AVOIR.

Software List

  • a preconfigured and easy to install mapserver [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/] extension for apache2 (already in debian). MapServer is an OpenSource development environment for constructing spatially enabled Internet-web applications. The software builds upon other popular OpenSource or freeware systems including Shapelib, FreeType, Proj.4, GDAL/OGR

  • data conversion tools to read shape files from proprietary tools
  • gpsd a daemon to parse GPS data from NMEA-compatible GPSes (and make it available to multiple clients)
  • gnuplot - portable command-line driven interactive data and function plotting utility
  • gpsdrive is a car (bike, ship, plane) navigation system
  • gpsman - graphical manager of GPS

currently in Ubuntu/Debian

Currently in Debian

Packaged but currently only in Debian-GIS repository

Packages been worked on in the Debian-GIS project

If you wanna help please write to the Debian-GIS mailing list.

Packaged but not in official Debian

Currently not packaged for Debian/Ubuntu

To support mapserver

Spatial MySQL extension

Need commercial app

Websites

New repositories

At the repository [http://www.orcaware.com/packages/ubuntu/] many GIS packages can be found, that work on Dapper and Breezy. Just ad the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.orcaware.com/packages/ubuntu/ breezy/
deb-src http://www.orcaware.com/packages/ubuntu/ breezy/

Note these are i386 only. Also try using the Dapper repositories first as several of these packages are now available there.

The DebianGIS project also builds from time to time some packages of useful CVS applications. GRASS 6.1cvs is one of them, and it's important because it differs slightly from the 6.0.4 version, though being as stable as it.

A minimal plan for a working GIS environment should include:

  • GRASS GIS 6.1cvs (powerful analysis)

  • QuantumGIS (easy to use, cross-platform, similar to ArcView but better, PostGIS connection and GRASS integration, Just Works (tm) )

  • PostgreSQL with PostGIS extension (OpenGIS compliant geodatabase)

  • UMN Mapserver (OpenGIS WMS compliant web mapping server, to become Mapserver Cheetah soon)

  • PHP Mapscript extension http://www.maptools.org/php_mapscript/

  • GDAL/OGR (current version 1.3.1)

  • PROJ.4 (current version 4.4.9 already in Ubuntu)

  • one or more GPS apps

And don't forget OGC compliance ([http://www.opengis.org Open Geospatial Consortium]) as it is the most important point for FLOSS in the geospatial field.

Other useful reference

http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/drupal/node/96

Here are detailed instructions on how to build a complete GIS working environment on a Debian-based GNU/Linux system. Works well on Ubuntu, too!

Launchpad UbuntuGIS team

Check out also the Launchpad UbuntuGIS team page https://launchpad.net/people/ubuntugis where users can get in touch in a collaborative way, share ideas, make proposals.

PostGIS tutorials

Quantum GIS (QGIS) tutorials and packages

["BuildingQuantumGisFromSource"] · This good and detailed HOWTO deals with compiling QuantumGIS on Ubuntu making the very best use of packages for all dependancies. Works for the SVN version, too!

Trial Ubuntu packages from current SVN version ( Warning /!\ work only with dapper!):

Packages in the above directory are date marked so just pick the most recent one.

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