spatialite-2.2 is a SQLite's extension, and includes in
itself four further SQLite's extensions: the RTree, the MbrCache, the VirtualShape
and the VirtualText ones.
There are various alternative ways you can follow at your choice to deploy and use them:
the spatialite executable way:
this one represents all-the-stuff-you-needalready-bounded-together
spatialite does not requires any installation;
you simply have to gunzip what you've just downloaded [i.e. spatialite-2.2-linux-x86-bin.tar.gz]
and put it in some directory
to get started you can launch the ./spatialite program. That's all. spatialite is a statically linked executable;
it has no external dependencies at all, so it's immediately ready to run
the sqlite3 way:
Many Linux distros support the sqlite3 package.
Very likely you have it already installed on your system
Caveat: the sqlite3 of standard distributions may be
is one doesn't supporting the dynamic extension loading mechanism anyway
if so, go to the SQLite downloads
and get the latest sqlite-version.bin.gz
get the spatialite-2.2-linux--x86-libs.zip
neither SQLite nor spatialite requires an installation;
you simply have to gunzip what you've just downloaded, placing binaries and dynamic libraries somewhere
[see note about dynamic libraries]
to get started you can launch the sqlite3 program, and then .load 'libspatialite.so'
That's all
the GUI tool way:
you can find lots of GUI tools supporting SQLite.
May well be one of them supports dynamic extensions loading; all the ones I tested refused to do this.
If you have best luck than me, then you simply have to get the spatialite-2.2-linux-x86-libs.tar.gz
gunzip it somewhere
copy all the various shared libraries somewhere [see note about dynamic libraries]
then you start you preferred SQLite GUI tool and after execute an SQL statement as:
SELECT load_extension('libspatialite.so');
If this works, you are ready to start
Managing shared libraries
On Linux systems, shared libraries are identified by a .so suffix
Usually they have a plain name i.e. somelib.so, but usually they
supports a version name as well, i.e. somelib.so.1.0
Usually this is accomplished simply by creating a symbolic link, as in:
$ ln -s somelib.so.1.0 somelib.so
Usually shared libraries must be placed in the /usr/lib directory
You can as well keep yours shared libraries in any other directory at your choice,
but in this case you have to set en environment variable, as in: