It seems everyone runs into trouble when installing Vision Workbench. Here’s a quick outline on how to get my favorite software on my second favorite platform. We’ll need to start with downloading all the dependencies through Ubuntu’s package manager called Aptitude.

sudo apt-get install build-essential automake libtool
             libboost1.42-all-dev libproj-dev git
             git-completion liblapack-dev ccache

The above command gets you most of the way. There is however one more dependency that we require. We need GDAL, which is a wonderful library for interfacing with many different file types and their geographic information. However Ubuntu only provides an old 1.6 version where Vision Workbench requires the latest and greatest 1.7.

Getting the newer version of GDAL requires an additional repo provided by UbuntuGIS. This can be achieved easily by doing the following:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgdal1-dev gdal-bin

If you happen to be one of my unfortunate interns (Muhawahaha) working from a laptop and stuck behind a government firewall. Here’s what Josh has to say about that:

However, if you are on the ARC-WLAN-GUEST network, port

11371 will most likely be blocked which will cause the above com-

mand (and programs like ping) to time out. If this is the case, the

answer is here.

First, add the line ”http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-

unstable/ubuntu lucid main” to your repository. Then, go to

the website http://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net/ and search for the key

0x314DF160. Copy the text that appears into a local file. Then

apt-key add filename-here. Now you should be able to get the latest gdal. Run apt-get’s update and then install libgdal1-dev.

git clone git://github.com/visionworkbench/visionworkbench.git
          VisionWorkbench

Others with ambitions of contributing back to the software will need to create a GitHub account and then proceed to fork Vision Workbench. Before you create a GitHub account, if you are unfamiliar with Git then you should read the first 2 chapters of ProGit. Proceed to GitHub and follow all the instructions until you have your ssh-keys setup. Then you’ll want to follow their instructions for how to fork a project. In the future when you want to contribute back to the group it will be performed with a pull request.

From inside your checked out copy of Vision Workbench in the first directory you’ll want to create a config.options file. In this file you’ll want to following contents.

ENABLE_DEBUG=yes
ENABLE_OPTIMIZE=yes
PREFIX=`pwd`/build/
ENABLE_CCACHE=yes
ENABLE_RPATH=yes
ENABLE_MODULE_MOSAIC=yes
ENABLE_MODULE_CAMERA=yes
ENABLE_MODULE_CARTOGRAPHY=yes
HAVE_PKG_GDAL=/usr
PKG_GDAL_CPPFLAGS=`gdal-config --cflags`
PKG_GDAL_LIBS=`gdal-config --libs`

Finally you are ready to compile and install Vision Workbench.

./autogen
./configure
make install

Vision Workbench is now installed in the build directory where the source code is checked out. You’ll probably want to point the environmental variable PATH to the build/bin directory.

If you still have spare cycles, you should run the test suite to find out if Vision Workbench is installed correctly. This is achieved with:

make check

You are now finished. It is now time to party.