QGIS

I looked for a spatial data browser and found GeoApt Spatial Data Browser. I got interested in adding to it, so I started looking at its internals. I became more curious about QGIS.

Building QGIS from source

First go do this: Building GDAL on Linux

Then do this based on this page: http://www.qgis.org/api/INSTALL.html#toc3

You don't want to overwrite your custom geos or gdal so this is different than the above link indicates. BTW I am building on Linux Mint 14, not Ubuntu or Debian

I like to break things up into smaller chunks too so I can see what's going on more easily.

# I'd be surprised if you dont already have these
sudo apt-get install xauth xfonts-base

# some general tools and development stuff
sudo apt-get install bison cmake doxygen flex git pkg-config python-dev python-sip python-sip-dev graphviz xvfb txt2tags
sudo apt-get install libfcgi-dev libgsl0-dev libexpat1-dev

# some QT tools
sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev libqtwebkit-dev libqwt5-qt4-dev pyqt4-dev-tools python-qt4 python-qt4-dev 

# some gis things
sudo apt-get install libspatialindex-dev libspatialite-dev libsqlite3-dev

1. left out because depend on gdal
2. libosgearth-dev libopenscenegraph-dev