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Usually building any free software packages is an easy task on Linux; anyway there are so many different
distros that very few hints may be useful to you:
- as a general rule you can legitimately expect that Linux will support any required pre-packaged library.
there are few notable exceptions to this rule: e.g. CentOS doesn't supports at all geos or proj.4
if this is your case, you can anyway build by yourself from sources.
- other times it happens that some library is actually supported, but using some really archaic (and completely useless)
obsolete version.
if this is your case, you can anyway get rid of the 'system packaged' obsolete version, and build by yourself
a more reasonable recent version.
- as a general rule, you should attempt to rely on system packages as far as possible, unless practically unfeasible.
Just very few sparse considerations directly coming from my first-hand experiences (2011 December):
- Fedora 16 is a lovely distro, supporting very recent versions of any required library.
- Both Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu 11.10 can offer you a slightly obsolete (but still useful) support.
- CentOS requires to build quite anything starting from sources, because the supported packages are too much obsolete
(or simply missing at all).
Building on every Linux is a very simple task: just open a shell (aka terminal) console, then type:
./configure
make -j8
sudo make install-strip
If ./configure reports some complaint, this means that one (or more) required packages cannot be successfully found.
- A very common mistake is installing the main (binary) packages, omitting to install the corresponding devel packages.
If this one is your case, you simply have to install the appropriate devel packages, then invoking ./configure
yet another time.
- Important notice: on Fedora (and maybe, on other distros too) another different reason may cause ./configure failures.
Usually pkg-config will indifferently retrieve any package installed on both /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib;
but on e.g. Fedora only packages installed on /usr/lib will be correctly identified under default settings.
Anyway, resolving this issue is really easy: you simply have to manually set the environment:
export "PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"
May well be you'll get at run-time an error message looking like this ""
e.g. this will happen on Debian: anyway resolving this issue is quite trivial:
- if you simply intend to launch some executable from the shell, you can duly set the environment:
export "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib"
- alternatively you can apply a permanent, system-wide setting:
edit this file: /etc/ld.so.conf
add /usr/local/lib at the end the file, then save;
and finally run: ldconfig
You can obviously launch both spatialite_gui and spatialite_gis from the shell;
but a by far better Desktop integration is now available.
(many thanks to Volker Froehlich for his kind support)
- go to the directory named gnome_resource you'll find within spatialite_gui sources, then type:
- sudo desktop-file-install spatialite-gui.desktop
- sudo cp spatialite-gui.png /usr/share/icons
Do exactly the same thing for spatialite_gis; all right, now you'll see both spatialite_gui
and spatialite_gis on the main Gnome menu:
search between Applications / Science (or Education, or Geography)
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