GDAL/OGR

The GDAL and OGR libraries provide support for raster and vector data formats. QGIS makes use of both of these libraries (which come bundled in one distribution).

Note: A Linux binary of GDAL is available at http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal. If you choose to install the binary you will also need to download and unpack the source tree since QGIS needs the header files in order to compile.

To install GDAL/OGR from source:

1. Download the GDAL distribution from http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal. You should use version 1.1.9 or higher. Versions prior to 1.1.9 contained a bug that caused problems when a null feature was encountered. If you want to build vector support for GRASS, you must use GDAL 1.2.3.

2. Untar the distribution

       tar xfvz /../path/../gdal-x.x.x.tar.gz
   

3. Change to the gdal-x.x.x subdirectory that was created by step 2

       cd gdal-x.x.x
   

4. Configure GDAL

       ./configure
   

   or if you want GRASS support

       ./configure --with-grass=<full path to grass install>
   

   Depending on the GDAL version you are building, it may be necessary to specify -without-ogdi when running configure if you don't have the OGDI libary avaiable on your system.

5. Build and install GDAL:

       make
       su
       make install
   

6. In order to run GDAL after installing it is necessary for the shared library to be findable. This can often be accomplished by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include /usr/local/lib. On Linux, you can add /usr/local/lib (or whatever path you used for installing GDAL) to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig as root.

7. Make sure that gdal-config (found in the bin subdirectory where GDAL was installed) is included in the PATH. If necessary, add the path to gdal-config to the PATH environment variable.

       export PATH=/../path/../gdal-config:$PATH
   

8. Check the install by running:

       gdal-config --prefix
   

If you've had problems during the installation, refer to this manual, where the whole process is described with some more detail: http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/gdal_building.html