[Xastir] Installing Xastir 1.9.9 on Ubuntu

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Aug 02, 2010 at 03:03:41PM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kc4lzn at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> This is what I got after I got past the motif error./
> 
> xastir 1.9.8 has been configured to use the following
> options and external libraries:
> 
> MINIMUM OPTIONS:
>    ShapeLib (Vector maps) ................. : yes (internal)
> 
> RECOMMENDED OPTIONS:
>    GraphicsMagick/ImageMagick (Raster maps) : yes (ImageMagick)
>    pcre (Shapefile customization) ......... : no
>    dbfawk (Shapefile customization) ....... : no
>    rtree indexing (Shapefile speedups) .... : yes
>    map caching (Raster map speedups) ...... : no
>    internet map retrieval ................. : yes (libcurl)
> 
> FOR THE ADVENTUROUS:
>    AX25 (Linux Kernel I/O Drivers) ........ : no
>    libproj (USGS Topos & Aerial Photos) ... : yes
>    GeoTiff (USGS Topos & Aerial Photos) ... : no
>    Festival (Text-to-speech) .............. : no
>    GDAL/OGR (Obtuse map formats) .......... : no
>    GPSMan/gpsmanshp (GPS downloads) ....... : yes
> 
> xastir will be installed in /usr/local/bin.
> Type 'make' to build Xastir (Use 'gmake' instead on some systems).
> john at john-hpmini:~/xastir$ /

Dhis is good news, as you've got most of the things for a barebones Xastir
install.

> 
> Where there are "no's" do I need to install those packages?

Yes.  If you want those features.  The PCRE and DBFAWK stuff is useful if you
want to use shapefile maps (they are what Xastir uses to render shapefile maps
with attention to feature type and name, otherwise you just get black lines).
Map caching is nice to save you from having to download online maps over and
over again (although Open Street Maps uses a different caching mechanism, so
if all you're using is OSM, you don't need it).

Geotiff is nice because it is a standard format for raster images, and you can
find a lot of good ones out there, including USGS topo maps (which, contrary
to the implications in the output of configure, is NOT the only use of this
feature).  GDAL is almost useless for Xastir --- it is a partially implemented
feature that mostly supports very esoteric uses, and is of interest only to
the rare Xastir user.  Festival is for speech synthesis.  It is sometimes
helpful, is often impressive to new users, but rapidly becomes annoying (your 
milage may vary, especially if you think of this feature as more of an 
accessibility issue).

The apt-get instructions you need to get all that done are in the lines that 
follow under the "Start Installing Packages" heading:

    *  Get additional libraries that will help for extra features: 

    sudo apt-get install gpsman gpsmanshp libpcre3-dev libdb4.8-dev python-dev libax25-dev shapelib libshp-dev festival festival-dev libmagickcore-dev


-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."