FWTools on Linux (Experimental 3.x)
Overview
Tradionally I offered a 32bit linux FWTools build including OpenEV, GDAL,
and MapServer. I ceased production of this circa 2008 as the build machine
died and I was not practically able to reconstitute the environment on a
new system. In 2010, with support from the USGS, I am reviving a new but
more modest generation of FWTools for Linux. The goals are:
- Provide GDAL built from trunk - the bleeding edge - with as many
formats supported as possible.
- Pull as many supporting libraries as possible from RPMs. These come
from the CentOS core, EPEL, and the Enterprise Linux GIS efforts.
- Bundle result into a standalone bundle that is isolated, and does not
interact with the native packaging system - it should work on any modern
Linux (on supported architectures).
- Support both i386 and x86_64 environments with native binaries.
OpenEV will be dropped from FWTools even though I still love it. It is built
on archaic technologies too hard to distribute. MapServer will not be
initially included, but I might add it if there is interest.
Download
For now during this experimental phase binaries can be downloaded from http://home.gdal.org/fwtools:
Installation
Just unpack, run the install.sh script in the new directory, and then add the
bin_safe directory to your path.
eg.
% tar xzvf FWTools-linux-x86_64-3.0.1.tar.gz
% cd FWTools-linux-x86_64-3.0.1
% ./install.sh
If you use Bash as your shell add the following to your startup script
(ie. ~/.bash_profile):
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/FWTools-linux-x86_64-3.0.1/bin_safe
or if you use csh or tcsh as your shell add the following to your .cshrc:
setenv PATH $PATH:$HOME/FWTools-linux-x86_64-3.0.1/bin_safe
Alternatively you can source either the fwtools_env.sh or fwtools_env.csh from the
FWTools directory to incorporate the environment directly into the current shell
environment.
How FWTools is Built
The build scripts and information on how FWTools is built is available by
anonymous CVS.
cvs -d :pserver:cvsanon@cvs.maptools.org:/cvs/maptools/cvsroot login
(use empty password)
cvs -d :pserver:cvsanon@cvs.maptools.org:/cvs/maptools/cvsroot fwtools/linuxdist
cd fwtools/linuxdist
less HOWTO-BUILD
Feedback
During this experimental phase, please feel free to provide feedback directly to me at warmerdam@pobox.com.