Web Mapping Illustrated

Installing Data Management Tools: GDAL and FWTools

If you examine the contents of the data folder you will find 49 files. These are map data files in ESRI shapefile format and GeoTIFF images. To learn more about them, you will use a tool from the GDAL project. GDAL comes bundled with the FWTools package, as does the OpenEV viewer and other utilities used in this book.

You can acquire the latest version of FWTools for your operating system or distribution from http://fwtools.maptools.org/. Examples used in this book are for the Linux operating system, but for Windows users, I have included notes where steps or usage varies.

Windows users

FWTools comes as an installation/setup file. First, download and execute the file. It should walk you through the setup steps. The setup program should place an FWTools Shell icon on your desktop. Launching this icon gives you a command prompt window for running FWTools commands.

Linux users

First, download the most recent tarball version of FWTools (e.g., FWTools-linux-0.9.8.tar.gz), and unzip/untar it into any folder you have handy. Linux users will be working from the command prompt/shell console to enter commands.

Now, open a console, and move into the folder that the file was saved in. This can be done using the cd command followed by the path to the folder. You can unzip the file by running:

                     > tar -xzvf FWTools-linux-0.9.8.tar.gz.

Run the installer by typing ./install.sh. This prepares the installation and creates a folder called bin_safe. Now, run ...