Category: Software

Nothing new in the packaging. See the MapServer site for the changelog.

A few updates. Image Magick fixes and update. PROJ ESPG codes updated. Other version updates. Too tired to say more, see the readmes.

I added X11 support for d.mon displays and all the d.* commands. NVIZ and gis.m still use Tcl/Tk Aqua for display. Best of both worlds!

I forgot to include FFTW in previous packages. It’s a framework, just drag it to /Library/Frameworks.

New GRASS binaries! 6.1 CVS. Universal for PPC and Intel. Aqua-fied, so there is no need for X11, even for NVIZ! There is a Tcl/Tk Aqua/Universal download on the GRASS page also. This is experimental and I’m providing it for testing purposes, so there may be (probably are) problems. One is that NVIZ works on PPC but crashes on Intel, at least on my MacBook (non-Pro).

I will try to update this from the weekly snapshots, or whenever I can fix Mac problems.

The GDAL JasPer (JPEG2000) driver has been changed to be a plugin. And a ‘disabled’ folder was added for GDAL plugins. While the driver used for writing images is controllable in GDAL programs, reading is not and GDAL uses the first driver it finds. This ‘disabled’ folder allows some control over which driver is used for reading JP2 images in GDAL (JasPer, MrSID or Kakadu).

And speaking of reading JP2 images, there seems to be a bug with the JasPer driver for reading JP2 (writing has no such problems) – it’s excrutiatingly slow. But the MrSID driver reads JP2, slower than JasPer would normally, but faster than it is now. Use the ‘disabled’ folder to disable JasPer temporarily to force a different driver – MrSID, or Kakadu (none available from me at this time) if one has the Kakadu libraries available to them.

Finally, the MrSID DSDK (decoding) is Tiger compatible and universal! I’ve made it available as a plugin for GDAL (for GIS Libs). They still haven’t followed ERMapper and made the DSDK explicitly open-source compatible, so it’s available as a separate download. Find it on the GIS Libs download page.

Right after the Graphics Libs 3.1, a serious problem with libtiff was fixed. So here’s Graphics Libs 3.1.1. Basically, generating overviews (gdaladdo) was nearly impossible – strip and block errors and crashes. It’s a couple different problems. The StripByteCounts errors and most block errors are fixed.

Another problem (the crashes) is with LZW compressed TIFFs, this isn’t fixed yet. There is a workaround: run gdaladdo on an uncompressed copy, then recompress that with geotifcp (not gdal_translate!), now all the overviews are compressed.

Graphics Libs: Sqlite updated to 3.3.6. ImageMagick updated to 6.2.8-0. GIS Libs: GEOS updated to 2.2.2. NetCDF now dynamic. Postgres: Postgres updated to 8.1.4. PlPerl now universal. MapServer: removed troublesome Oracle support, which fixes non-working Python MapScript.

In all packages I’ve cleaned up some build issues that should help developers. They’ve also been rebuilt from scratch with a single-build process (except Postgres), instead of separate builds merged together. This shouldn’t affect their usability, but most libraries and programs did grow about 1% in size.

I was getting a little impatient for QGIS 0.8, and decided to build from SVN. Universal binary for both PPC and Intel Macs. Definitely works on Tiger, but I haven’t tried Panther yet – depends on Qt and QGIS, since my other packages should work on Panther.

GRASS reading support is provided by GIS Libs. GRASS editing requires a full GRASS install, but I haven’t gotten that far yet, so don’t ask me what to do. Eventually I’ll probably make my own GRASS installer and make sure it works with QGIS. It may be a simple thing and you could use any GRASS installation.

I’ve been working on streamlining the build process on my MacBook, and I have a fix for the non-working Python MapScript, plus some minor package updates, I just got distracted by QGIS. Look for more soon.

Well, I’m settling into my new MacBook. Nice computer.

Normally I’ve had great success cloning the system to new Macs or simply exchanging the old HD. I couldn’t really do that with the different processor, and I wanted to separate my work and home computer life more. So, I started from scratch, used a different username, set prefs from scratch and played with other options I had ignored or didn’t know had been introduced in the OS.

I took the chance, before installing Xcode, to install all my packages as distributed. Everything seems to be in working order. But I discovered a problem that’s been around since day 1 – when the installer creates the postgres user in the system, it doesn’t set a password. This was intentional – no password = no login for that user. But I missed a small technicality: no password = no password needed to login for that user, * means no login possible. You will notice this if you have your Mac login options set to show a list of users at the login screen, you will see postgres as a choice.

I fixed this in an update, now available. But it’s easily fixed with NetInfo Manager. Open NetInfo Manager and unlock the default domain (the window that opens by default). Select users, then postgres from the lists. Edit the passwd property and change it to * (just a single asterisk). Save and quit.