Every day there seem to be more opportunities for FOSS GIS to be deployed in some production context. However it is a real missed opportunity when people come looking for a solution and we never get to hear about it. Two came accross my desk in the last week:

The first was a tender for building a geodatabase for rural water supply in rural Namibia using PostGIS, QGIS and other FOSSGIS tools. Unfortunately I only got the tender call after the closing date, but it seems it would have been a fantastic opportunity.

The second was a call by the South African IT Agency (SITA) for FOSS solution providers to attend a demonstration day to show ministers and decision makers the products that they can support. Once again this would have been a great opportunity to extoll the virtues of QGIS.

Reflecting on these and other missed opportunities makes me think it would be a nice idea to have some kind of website that aggregates opportunities by region….of coulse it would need time and energy from someone to populate it…

Last night we reached another milestone in the QGIS project, releasing a bug fix for our stable version and the next point release in our unstable series. The unstable release adds many new features including support for personal geospatial datastores in portable sqlite databases. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities since it now makes it very easy to ship rich datasets to people within a single container. The windows builds of QGIS now include a standalone installer, which I have packaged with MrSid support (with agreement with the vendors). We are working on obtaining similar agreement for ECW support.

Now we can start plugging away at the next point release which will no doubt have may more nifty new goodies. You can read the full release notices here.

Its quick (overlooking slow internet access) and easy to set up Ubuntu Jaunty 64 bit for use with the FOSSGIS stack. Here are the packages I install once the base system is set up (including a few non-fossgis ones that are nice to have).

sudo apt-get install build-essential vim grass libqt4-core \
libqt4-debug libqt4-dev libqt4-gui libqt4-qt3support libqt4-sql \
lsb-qt4 qt4-designer   qt4-dev-tools qt4-doc qt4-qtconfig uim-qt gcc \
libapt-pkg-perl resolvconf   gdal-bin libgdal1-dev libgeos-dev proj \
libgdal-doc libhdf4g-dev libhdf4g-run python-dev  python-gdal libgsl0-dev \
g++ libjasper-dev libtiff4-dev subversion libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 ccache \
make libpq-dev flex bison cmake txt2tags python-qt4 python-qt4-dev \
python-sip4 sip4 python-sip4-dev postgresql-8.3-postgis vim ctags \
vim-scripts python-django python-psycopg2 vim apache2 \
sun-java6-fonts python-geoip imagemagick grass-dev ia32-libs \
graphviz txt2tags texlive-fonts-recommended \
texlive-fonts-recommended-doc texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc \
tipa tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin texlive-base-bin-doc \
texlive-common texlive-doc-base gv latex2html texlive-latex-extra \
libqwt5-qt4-dev pyqt4-dev-tools drivel lightning-extension thunderbird-gnome-support \
gwibber python-django-evolution python-django-dmigrations python-django-djblets \
python-django-debug-toolbar python-django-registration python-django-lint \
python-django-tagging awn-applets-c-extras awn-applets-python-extras\
gnome-do tomcat6-admin tomcat6 enigmail

You also need to get rid of this since it doesnt play nice with QGIS:

sudo apt-get remove uim-qt3

Note: the ia32-libs is needed to run google earth under ubuntu 64