OpenSUSE Geo Repositories
This page presents information about installing Geospatial applications to the openSUSE Linux distribution.
openSUSE is a very popular server and desktop operating system, with an evolving community of users and developers. It is well known for its developing tools, configuration simplicity and its great collection of software.
Especially for the geospatial world, openSUSE was one of the first distributions to provide great collection of pre-packaged software. In the last 3 years, with the development of openSUSE Build Service (OBS) many users can build software of their own and distribute packages. At the same time, with OBS, new packages are getting included and maintained every day.
Stable OBS projects for Geospatial Applications
The official repository of geospatial applications for openSUSE is Application:Geo.
This project is maintained by official openSUSE members (some of which are also OSGeo members). It includes packages for various well known software (Mapserver, Geoserver, GDAL, GRASS, QGIS, PostGIS, Proj4 etc). For a full list of projects, check this link
For this OBS project, many architectures are supported, as well as other Linux distributions as well. Application:Geo is also a part of openSUSE Factory, i.e. is part of the development branch that will become the next version of the distribution. This means that the above packages are provided for past, current and future versions of openSUSE and are build often, when a dependency software gets changed.
To install this repository in your openSUSE server/desktop you can use the following line from terminal:
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Application:/Geo/openSUSE_11.4/ GEO
Then in order to install a package use:
sudo zypper install mapserver
Alternatively, one can use YAST Software Management to add the repository using the above link and then install packages from a Graphical User Interface.
Finally, for beginners, there is an easier option to install software, the openSUSE Software Website. e.g. search for gdal. The results also provide One-Click Installer that will automatically add repositories and dependencies.