Gentoo-GIS overlay Project

Goals of the project

Gentoo-GIS is an overlay for Gentoo systems that aims to provide updated/bleeding-edge/developer versions of major GIS projects to Gentoo users.

Gentoo developers do what they can do (and sometimes, more) to keep Gentoo Linux functional, stable and complete. Nonetheless, Gentoo herds that deal with GIS FLOSS are not so quick and not so smart, probably due to the lack of involved developers and the disproportion between the requests they receive and the fixes they are able to provide.

In such a quick developing world, GIS-related softwares in the Gentoo realm tend to be forgotten. Gentoo-GIS project aims to deal with the needs of GIS users which want/need a working and up-to-date GIS environment without losing a lot of time writing ebuilds, trying to find out what configure options mean or which software is required for a certain project to compile.

GIS projects covered

Gentoo-GIS overlay provides, at the moment, ebuilds for these projects:

• CSF libraries for PCRaster support (Homepage), version 2.0 of 2004-11-11;
• GDAL libraries (Homepage), versions 1.4.0beta1, 1.4.0beta2, 1.4.0RC1, 1.4.0, 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 all with ECW support;
• Geotiff libraries (Homepage), version 1.2.3 and 1.2.4;
• GDAL-GRASS plugin, versions 1.3.1.2, 1.3.2, 1.4.1 and 1.4.3;
• Java Topology Suite (JTS, Homepage), version 1.7.2;
• Geo-Shapelib (Homepage) 0.20 from CPAN;
• Tree-R (Homepage) 0.05 from CPAN;
• GRASS GIS (Homepage), versions 6.1.0, 6.2.0RC1, 6.2.0RC2, 6.2.0, 6.2.1;
• QGis (Homepage), versions 0.7.4, 0.8.0pre1, 0.8.0;
• gpx2shp (Homepage), version 0.69;
• UMN Mapserver (Homepage), version 4.10.1 and 4.10.2.

All Gentoo-GIS ebuilds are fully integrated with the others in the overlay and the official Portage tree. If you are interested in some of these, you can also browse the SVN repository.

Which architectures are supported?

For the moment, the only supported architectures are x86 and amd64. Please, contact the team (see below) if you want to candidate yourself for testing on some other architectures.

Also remember that all ebuilds are available for testing only (~x86, ~amd64) due to Gentoo policy.

How do I get Gentoo-GIS overlay with layman?

If you are a Gentoo user and you don't know what 'overlay' and 'layman' mean, please read this and this.

Instead, if you do know, please check that you have layman (the overlays manager) already installed on your system, then launch this command on a valid root shell on a Gentoo machine:

# layman -f -o http://gentoo-gis.sourceforge.net/layman.xml -a gentoo-gis

After that, you can emerge your favourite GIS softwares.

What can I do if I encounter some problems? And if I find some bugs?

Gentoo-GIS project has an IRC channel, #gentoo-gis on the FreeNode Network. Please join us if you want to talk with the developers.

Gentoo-GIS project is hosted on SourceForge and thus uses SourceForge resources; use the Forum, post bugs, requests or patch on the Tracker or write to overlay mantainers. You can find their addresses via the SF Project Page.