PerryGeo

It just keeps getting easier and easier to get a fully functional open source GIS workstation up and running thanks to Ubuntu. The following instructions will take your vanilla installation of Ubuntu 7.10 and add the following top-notch desktop GIS applications:

• Postgresql/PostGIS : a relational database with vector spatial data handling
• GRASS : A full blown GIS analysis toolset
• Quantum GIS: A user-friendly graphical GIS application
• GDAL, Proj, Geos : Libraries and utilities for processing spatial data
• Mapserver : web mapping program and utilites
• Python bindings for QGIS, mapserver and GDAL
• GPSBabel : for converting between various GPS formats
• R : a high-end statistics package with spatial capabilities
• GMT : the Generic Mapping Tools for automated high-quality map output

While this is not a comprehensive list of open source GIS software, these packages cover most of my needs. If you want to live on the bleeding edge and have to have the absolute latest versions, you’ll be better off installing these from source. But for those of us that want a stable and highly functional GIS workstation with minimal fuss, this is the way to go:

1. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources and make sure the universe and multiverse repositories are turned on. Close the window and the list of available software packages will be refreshed.
2. Open up a terminal (ie the command line) via Applications > Accessories > Terminal and type the following:
   

   sudo apt-get -y install qgis grass qgis-plugin-grass mapserver-bin gdal-bin cgi-mapserver \
   python-qt4 python-sip4 python-gdal python-mapscript gmt gmt-coastline-data \
   r-recommended gpsbabel shapelib libgdal1-1.4.0-grass

   The sudo part indicates that the command will be run as the administrator user, apt-get -y install is the command telling it to install the list of packages and answer yes to any questions that pop up.

3. There is one package that is worth upgrading to the latest and greatest - Quantum GIS. The latest version (0.9) is due out very shortly and has the ability to write plugins using the python programming language. A big plus!

   Download the latest build from http://qgis.org/uploadfiles/testbuilds/qgis0.9.0.debs_ubuntu_gutsy.tar.gz and extract it ( right-click > Extract Here ). In the directory you’ll see 4 .deb files, only 3 of which you’ll need unless you plan on doing any development work.

   Double click libqgis1_0.9.0_i386.deb and you’ll get a message saying an older version is available from directly from ubuntu. We already know this so just close and ignore it. Click Install Package and wait for it to complete then close out.

   Repeat for qgis_0.9.0_i386.deb and qgis-plugin-grass_0.9.0_i386.deb (in that order).

And there we have it, about 15 minutes depending on your internet speed and you’ve installed a high-end GIS workstation built completely on free and open source software.

With the release of QGIS 0.9 imminent , I decided to install in on Windows XP and noticed that the geocoding plugin was failing… sure enough I had hardcoded linux temporary directories. So I reworked the python code to determine the temp dir in a more cross-platform way (using tempfile.gettempdir() ) and it works fine.

The update can be downloaded here.

Assuming you’ve installed qgis in the standard location, just unzip this into C:\Program Files\Quantum GIS\python\plugins (windows) or /usr/share/qgis/python/plugins (Linux) and you should be good to go. Note that you’ll have to create the “plugins” directory if it doesn’t exist.

A few weeks back, I decided to take the plunge and learn the python bindings for QGIS 0.9. My first experiment was to implement a geocoder plugin. What started mostly as a learning experiment turned into something that might actually be useful!

The idea was to use web services to do all the actual geocoding work (the hard part!) and the delimited text provider to load the results into qgis. Right now it’s built on top of the Yahoo geocoder which is, IMO, the best out there.. very flexible about the input format. The geopy module is used to interact with the geocoding services so it could potentially support other engines such as geocoder.us, virtual earth, google, etc.

The user interface is very straightforward; enter list of addresses/placenames seperated by a line break, pick an output file and go. To be legitimate, you should also sign up for a yahoo api key, though the ‘YahooDemo’ key will work ok for testing purposes.

Here’s the install process (assuming you already have python, pyqt4, qgis 0.9, qgis bindings, etc. set up):

 svn checkout http://perrygeo.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/qgis/geocode
 cd geocode
 emacs Makefile # change install directory if needed
 sudo make install

This is just a rough cut and it’s my first attempt at using the qgis and qt apis so there are probably many things that could be improved upon. Ideally this plugin could:

• Parse text files as input
• Allow for a choice of geocoding engine
• ???

Feedback (and patches) welcome