QGIS at FOSS4G 2011 in Denver

Sourcepole is conducting a QGIS workshop and giving two presentations:

• Workshop: New features for QGIS power users
• QGIS, what’s new?
• Publishing maps from the desktop with QGIS server

There are more QGIS workshops and presentations:

• Workshop: Customizing QGIS with Python Plugins
• Efficiently using PostGIS with QGIS
• Quantum GIS & Inkscape: Cartographic Tools for Attractive Maps
• Web Mapping Performance Shootout

Case studies:

• QGIS in an Academic Library: A Case Study
• Cellular Automata QuantumGIS plugin and web-based application
• A WPS Based Biogeography Tool for QGIS
• FOSS4G: Technology Enabling Humanitarian Relief Efforts
• A Prototype of open source tool for water resources management in developing countries

So if you’re interested in QGIS, don’t miss FOSS4G 2011 in Denver. Early-bird registration ends June 30th.

QGIS Cloud and Sourcepole are proud to be official sponsors of the team Öcher-Safari, attending the Allgäu-Orient-Rallye. One of the last adventures in the world of cars. Sourcepole serves the team with know how, infrastructure and more. Information about the team and the charity ideas of this event you can find on Öcher-Safari and the official web site of the Allgäu-Orient-Rallye.

We’ll be using Postgis2.0 from UbuntuGIS, which has packages for a number of recent Ubuntu releases. Since Ubuntu precise has libc6 2.14 and Debian wheezy only 2.13 we fall back on Ubuntu oneiric for packages, which also has libc6 2.13.

However Postgis 2.0 in UbuntuGIS depends on a lot of llibraries which were in squeeze but live in wheezy under a higher version. Therefore we’ll install a lot of packages from Debian squeeze. Fortunately the libraries are versioned themselves and thus can be installed along the libraries from Debian wheezy.

Let’s go. Add the Debian squeeze sources:

# SRC="deb http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main"
# echo "$SRC" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

We’ll also add the security source, in case Debian releases a security update.

# SRC="deb http://ftp.ch.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main"
# echo "$SRC" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

You may want to replace ftp.ch.debian.org by a debian mirror nearer to you.

Now add the UbuntuGIS sources:

# SRC="deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu oneiric main"
# echo "$SRC" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntugis.list

Now update and try to install postgis:

# apt-get update
# apt-get install postgresql-9.1-postgis

Create your database:

# sudo su
# su - postgres
$ psql postgres
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE your_db OWNER your_preferred_user:

Now add the postgis features to that database:

$ psql -d your_db -f /usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib/postgis-2.0/
$ psql -d your_db -f /usr/share/postgresql/9.1/contrib/postgis-2.0/spatial_ref_sys.sql

That should be it. Let’s hope it works.

A final warning: you are mixing multiple distributions here. This can lead to problems. Due to version conflicts upgrading packages can become very difficult.

Tomáš Pospíšek tpo_hp@sourcepole.ch

Our favorite WFS-T server complement of UMN Mapserver is TinyOWS. We like the simplicity of it so much, that we packaged it for Ubuntu and added it to OSGeoLive. Installation is easy:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tinyows

The simplicity is a little bit too much, when it comes to serve multiple WFS-T on the same server. There is only one configuration file, but we want a configuration for each service. There are solutions for that, but I never saw a documentation of the most elegant solution we found. It uses Apache rewrite capabilities to set the TINYOWS_CONFIG_FILE environment variable according to the called URL:

# URL rewriting
RewriteEngine On

# Forbid direct access
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/.*$ - [F]

# Rewrite /xxx to /cgi-bin/tinyows with TINYOWS_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/tinyows/xxx.xml
RewriteRule ^/(.+)$ /cgi-bin/tinyows [QSA,PT,L,E=TINYOWS_CONFIG_FILE:/etc/tinyows/$1.xml]

This configuration included in a virtual host declaration (wfs.example.com) serves your WFS-T on wfs.example.com/servicename.

Sourcepole bietet Grundlagen- und Aufbau-Kurse für den Betrieb von Geodaten-Infrastrukturen auf der Basis von PostgreSQL/PostGIS und Quantum GIS an. Detaillierte Informationen zu den Kursen, die im Frühjahr 2013 stattfinden, entnehmen Sie bitte http://www.sourcepole.ch/kurse Die Anmeldung ist ab sofort online möglich. Wir freuen uns darauf Sie in Zürich begüssen zu können.

The Region of Umbria, Italy, sponsored 4 days of work to update QGIS Globe for current QGIS versions. Most of the functionality is working again and the globe is now compatible with osgEarth 1.0 up to 1.3. The bad news is, that the globe plugin is not working on Windows with OSGeo4W. It seems that one of the OSGeo4W libraries (GDAL?) is compiled with an incompatible MS compiler version. Christmas holidays are coming…

At least it gives Linux users the possibility to play with the globe using the current development version and do exciting stuff like Oslandia does:

PostGIS 3D demo

Imagine someone would sponsor four weeks of QGIS Globe work!