Easy methods of installing and having access to the GDAL library?
The GDAL library homepage implies that people who arrive there already know what they are doing. I work with ArcGIS, and am unfamiliar with intricate setups with library dependencies as GDAL suggests. Is there an easy "package" i can download? I have found maptools.org, and i guess the libraries that has is accessible by any programming language of choice? I also found QGIS which apparently uses GDAL.
I am looking into GDAL because it has functionality that ArcGIS does not. My language of choice is python. What is my best (and easieist) route to take here??
thanks!
Answer
The easiest option is probably to use the OSGeo4W (for Windows) installer. With this you can select GDAL from a large list of OpenSource GIS tools. Under "libs" select the version of GDAL you want. To add Python support select gdal**-python making sure the versions match. You can uncheck anything else (except I think you need Python-numpy which is selected by default):
http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/
Then check out some of the sample Python / GDAL scripts at:
http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/trunk/gdal/swig/python/samples/
More GDAL Python details here:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/GDAL/
Other Options
Take a look at http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/DownloadingGdalBinaries
You can run the set up package in the zip here (there doesn't seem to be a 1.7 version out yet):
http://download.osgeo.org/gdal/win32/1.6/gdalwin32exe160.zip
A smaller collection of tools can be found here (FW is for Frank Warmerdam the creator/maintainer of GDAL):