Installing spatialite-2.3.0 on Linux

SpatiaLite implements a complete Spatial DBMS engine based on the very popular SQLite.
A complete set of spatially-oriented extensions are directly implemented in SpatiaLite:

SpatiaLite itself supports the Geometry data type and related Spatial SQL functions as defined by the Open Gis Consortium - OGC
RTree is the original SQLite implementation for Spatial Indexing
MbrCache represents an alternative implementation for Spatial Indexing
mathSQL supports useful mathematical SQL functions as Cos(), Sqrt() Log() ...
VirtualShape allows immediate SQL access to Shapefiles
VirtualText allows immediate SQL access to TXT/CSV files
VirtualNetwork supports Routing
EXIF GPS supports EXIF metadata, including GPS position when available

There are various alternative ways you can follow at your choice to deploy and use them:

the spatialite-gui way:
- this one represents all-the-stuff-you-need already-bounded-together, and adopts an user friendly GUI
  i.e. you can simply work in the most natural way you are accustomed, using graphic windows and taking profit of the mouse
- spatialite-gui does not requires any installation process;
  you simply have to unpack what you've just downloaded [i.e. spatialite-gui-linux-x86-2.3.0.tar.gz] and put it in some folder
- to get started you can launch the spatialite-gui program. That's all.
  spatialite-gui is a statically linked executable; it has no external dependencies at all, so it's immediately ready to run
the spatialite way:
- this one represents all-the-stuff-you-need already-bounded-together, and is a classic CLI database front end quite identical to its brother sqlite3
- spatialite does not requires any installation process;
  you simply have to unpack what you've just downloaded [i.e. spatialite-tools-linux-x86-2.3.0.tar.gz] and put it in some folder
- to get started you can launch the spatialite program from the shell. That's all.
  spatialite is a statically linked executable; it has no external dependencies at all, so it's immediately ready to run
- and you can follow this way in order to deploy any other tool, such as exif_loader, spatialite_network ...
the sqlite3 way:
- go to the SQLite downloads and get the latest sqlite-version-bin.gz
- then get libspatialite-linux-x86-2.3.0.tar.gz
- neither SQLite nor SpatiaLite requires any installation process;
  you simply have to unpack 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' or SELECT load_extension('libspatialite.so');
  That's all
the xxx GUI tool way / the xxx language binding way:
- there are lots of GUI tools supporting SQLite
- and there are lots of language bindings supporting SQLite as well:
  - Python
  - PHP
  - Java
- more or less you simply need to perform the same steps as for using sqlite3
- simply performing SELECT load_extension('libspatialite.so'); will then start SpatiaLite
- if your preferred software refuses to load extensions, then you have to stop and surrender yourself.
  this actually means there is no way to interoperate your sqlite-related software and SpatiaLite.
  you can found an in-depth explanation for this here

Then I suggest you to download the test.db database and follow the tutorial step by step;
it's the fastest way to become accustomed with SpatiaLite and any related stuff.

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 or /usr/local/lib directories

You can keep yours shared libraries in any other directory at your choice, but in this case you have to set en environment variable, as in:

$ export "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/user_name/my_preferred_so_dir"

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