Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

[Posted January 27, 2009 by corbet]

Here's a brief survey of location-oriented tools for Linux. "The GTK+ widgets provided by libchamplain have already been adopted by several GNOME applications. A new plugin for the GNOME image viewer, for example, will display a map with markers to show the location of images with geolocation metadata. The library is also going to be used in Empathy, the GNOME instant messaging client. Empathy's new location-aware functionality uses an XMPP extension that describes a wide range of location metadata. It is built on top of GeoClue and uses libchamplain to display a graphical user interface."

Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2009 0:29 UTC (Wed) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (2 responses)

Hooray! Except they completely forgot about kde/marble which has been around for quite a while now and is used in several kde apps.

Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2009 3:43 UTC (Wed) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link]

This article talks about two different aspects of geolocation: getting the location to the application and displaying that location in a user friendly way. Marble covers the latter but not the former, afaics.

Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2009 7:28 UTC (Wed) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

Marble is not dependent on KDE, it also can be used in Qt-only apps.
I.e. at the time you build marble, you can decide whether you want to
build the Qt-only version or the version with KDE integration.

Alex

Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2009 6:31 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (2 responses)

So, what, they never heard of Mapserver? PostGIS? GDAL/OGR? All of those have been running on Linux for years.

Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2009 7:47 UTC (Wed) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link]

These are all server-side things for GIS. Geoclue is about deeply integrating geolocation into the desktop, providing geographic information in real time. Libchamplain (and I guess Marble) is about showing maps with that information on them, again in an easily digestible format.

For the record: FreeGIS.org

Posted Jan 28, 2009 8:08 UTC (Wed) by JJ (subscriber, #2321) [Link]

The FreeGIS Project provides:

software overview on Free Geographic Information Systems

communication on developments, plans, infos on Free GIS Software and Free Geo-Data

Location-aware software comes to the Linux platform (ars technica)

Posted Jan 28, 2009 13:58 UTC (Wed) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link]

Wow. The article mentions http://gsmloc.org. I haven't seen that much comment spam in a very very long time:
http://gsmloc.org/locate?nid1=460&nid2=0&lac=6144...