A Geospatial Werewolf

I've been contemplating a post with the tile "Seduced by the Dark Side - Or Why I Love My MacBook Air".  I decided not to devote a whole post to such evil things, so I'll restrict myself to a few paragraphs and then move on to better things.  Let me just admit it.  I really like using the MacBook Air that I was given at work.  I didn't buy it.  I know it's evil (really, really evil, in fact, since it is sooo seductive), and I will certainly do all I can to resist its evil temptations.  I've already removed all the Apple Store paid for applications that were on it, and I've installed Homebrew and a host of free software (things like QGIS and pgAdmin3).  I also installed VirtualBox and set up a Lubuntu 14.04 VM on it, which I use most of the time. In spite of all that, I have to admit that I really like using it.  I like the way it looks.  I like the way it feels in my hands and under my fingers as I type on it.  I like the way it responds so smoothly and quickly. There, I've come clean and got that out of my system.  The last thing to mention is that when I told my friend Kevin Cole that I had been seduced by the dark side, he knew without being told what I was going to say, and sent me this link, which pretty much hits the nail on the head...

Lubuntu 15.10 - A Geospatial Werewolf

Moving back into the realm of freedom, the upcoming release of Lubuntu 15.04, which I am running now on a few different machines but which will have its official release on October 22nd, offers new Python 3 versions of the geospatial libraries I described in a post back on April 19th. It also comes with QGIS version 2.8, which is a good thing indeed, since the version 2.4 that came with previous versions did not work properly (I couldn't get it to create layers using the DB Manager).  Here are the Python 3 GIS packages I installed on this new version, code named Wily Werewolf:

• python3-gdal
• python3-pyproj
• python3-shapely
• python3-mapnik

The last one in particular was not available in previous releases. And as if a sign of its strong GIS support, the default background on the Lubuntu version features a TIN pattern.  Here is a screenshot with QGIS running:

 

I've been tasked this week with looking into how to use mapnik.  Thanks to Wily, I'll be able to do this in Python 3.