[postgis-users] Linux installation

[Mathieu Basille]

Dear Steve,

As a complement to what Paolo said: I don't know about other distros, 
and I'll talk only about Debian which I use on a daily basis. A fresh 
Debian install (stable or testing or even sid) is not up-to-date in 
terms of GIS packages. Examples:

- QGIS: last release is 1.7; Debian only provides 1.4 in all flavours of 
Debian;
- GDAL: last release is 1.8.1; Debian provides 1.6 for stable, 1.7 for 
testing, and 1.8 for experimental, which is hardly installable due to 
dependency troubles (but they are working on it).

I don't mean that Debian is a bad choice... Especially since I'm using 
it as my primary platform! It is indeed very good for many reasons. But 
if you want cutting-edge GIS tools, you'll need to tweak Debian a bit. 
For example, you can find how to install most recent QGIS versions here: 
http://www.qgis.org/wiki/DownloadFr#Debian

Back to PostGIS now. If you want the latest stable release, which is 
1.5.3, a simple

[sudo] aptitude install postgis

under testing should do the trick. If you want to run stable (which is a 
good choice), you can use some apt-pinning to be able to install 
packages from testing, or you can use PostGIS 1.5.2 with the previous 
command line.

If you're interested in the development version, i.e. PostGIS 2.0 with 
raster support, it'll be slightly more complicated to have a complete 
GIS platform (but not impossible I guess). For instance, you'll need to 
compile everything by hand from GDAL 1.8 to PostGIS 2.0 through QGIS... 
But in this case, there is no GIS-related reason to use Debian: 
compilation should be the same under any Linux distro, so just pick up 
the one you like (or the one for which you have people to help you around).

Hope this helps,
Mathieu.


Le 11/11/2011 04:19, Paolo Cavallini a écrit :
> Il 10/11/2011 17:41, Steve.Toutant at inspq.qc.ca ha scritto:
>> Hi,
>> Sorry for cross-posting on several lists, but we are in the process of
>> taking some important decisions, on the OS to use...
>> For several years we have mapserver, gdal and Postgis, etc... running
>> on a Windows server.
>> We plan to migrate our GIS tools from the Windows server to SUSE Linux
>> Enterprise Server 11.
>> I heard bad comments on using SLES with mapserver, postgres/postgis,
>> gdal, etc...Taht the installation of these tools was a pain compare to
>> OpenSUSE or UBUNTU.
>> Comments on using and maintaining GIS infrastructure with SLES 11
>> would be very appreciated.
>>
> Hi all.
> I think having GIS packages ready and updated is the most important
> thing in choosing a Linux distro. Debian should be the best, as it is
> updated and wdely used and tested.
> All the best.
>
> --
> Paolo Cavallini
> See:http://www.faunalia.it/pc
>
>
>
> This body part will be downloaded on demand.

-- 

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Mathieu Basille, Post-Doc

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