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.

Working with the QGIS package

Okay, my problem is that I want to use a custom built GDAL because I need to be able to read ESRI file geodatabases but don't want to take on building QGIS right now.

I am getting the version of QGIS from "http://qgis.org/debian-nightly quantal main", but this packaged QGIS depends on a pre-built GDAL package. This means I have to bypass the pre-built GDAL libraries after they have been installed.

sudo apt-get install qgis
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
 gdal-bin grass-core libarmadillo3 libavdevice53 libcoin60 libdap11 libdapclient3 libepsilon0 libgdal1 libgraphicsmagick3 libhdf4-0-alt libhdf5-7 libnetcdfc7 libopenscenegraph80 libopenthreads14 libosgearth1 libqgis1.9.0 libqscintilla2-8 libqwt6 libxerces-c28 libxine1 libxine1-bin libxine1-ffmpeg libxine1-misc-plugins libxine1-plugins libzip2
 python-egenix-mxdatetime python-egenix-mxtools python-gdal python-psycopg2 python-pyspatialite python-qgis python-qgis-common python-qscintilla2 qgis-common qgis-plugin-globe qgis-plugin-globe-common qgis-plugin-grass qgis-plugin-grass-common qgis-providers qgis-providers-common

After installing I can see that it's not using the generic libgdal, good. See ldd /usr/bin/qgis.bin output.

I disabled /usr/lib/libgdal by renaming it just to be on the safe side.

Building QGIS from source

This is an onerous task...

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