[mapserver-users] Problems with using demo and newer GD/newer Mapserver (And solutions)

[Beau Gunderson]

If you use a newer version of GD you'll get an error about not being able
to load the reference image. This is because it's in GIF format: one needs
only to use the ImageMagick 'convert' utility to change it to a PNG.
('convert reference.gif reference.png')

There's another problem when using a newer version of Mapserver with the
old demo: The symbols formats have changed. While this is noted in the
demo installation instructions, the solution it proposes doesn't work. The
instructions say to concatenate the three files into one. Mapserver gives
errors about this file because it's not in the correct format still.
There's a link to a symbols file somewhere on the website, but I still had
to edit it to get it to work, as it did not contain the 'shield' entities,
it only contained shape entities like 'circle', 'triangle', etc.

One other thing, which might only pertain to code from the CVS repository:
Mapserver complains that QUERY is an invalid identifier on line 149 of the
'demo.map' file. I commented the QUERY blocks out and got it to display an
image, finally. =)

-Beau Gunderson