
Thuban - a Geographic Data Viewer
=================================

$Date: 2005/07/05 19:38:39 $
$Revision: 1.10 $

Thuban is an interactive viewer for geographic data.  
Python and the wxWidgets framework ensure great portability.
Thuban is Free Software and runs on GNU/Linux, Windows 
and several other operating systems.


About the Name
--------------

Thuban is the name of a star in the constellation Draco (The Dragon).
About 4000 years ago it was the north star.


Requirements
------------

Thuban requires the following software to be installed:

  Python     2.2.1    http://www.python.org
  wxWidgets  2.4.0.4  http://www.wxwidgets.org (formerly known as wxWindows)
  wxPython   2.4.0.4  http://www.wxpython.org
  proj       4.4.5    http://www.remotesensing.org/proj/
  SQLite     2.8.3    http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/
  PySQLite   0.4.3    http://pysqlite.sourceforge.net

The versions given are the lowest versions that are known to work. for
proj, sqlite and pysqlite somewhat older versions probably work as well.
Note that the wxPython version must be the same as the wxWidgets version
(Some wxPython binary packages already contain the right wxWidgets version)

Optional software:

  GDAL       1.2.5  http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/
     for raster image (geo-tiff) support

  psycopg    1.0.x  http://initd.org/software/psycopg
     for postgis connections. Newer version probably also work


Installation
------------

Building Thuban (this compiles the extension modules but leaves them in
a directory under build/):

   python setup.py build


To setup Thuban to run directly from the source directory:

   python setup.py install_local

You can run this without running build first.


To install Thuban:

   python setup.py install


for general information about the command line options of the setup.py
script, run

   python setup.py --help


If you build from CVS and want to have translated menus, dialogs etc.
you have to build the message catalogs manually before you run setup.py.
See po/README for more information.


Build Troubleshooting
---------------------

When building Thuban, you might have problems because of a missing file
wx/wxPython/wxPython.h.  This file is part of wxPython and may be
packaged in a separate package.  Unfortunately, on some systems this
file is not packaged at all.  On those systems you can try a work-around
built into Thuban, by passing the --use-wx-python-swig-hack to the
build_ext command.  This can be done on the command line for the build
command like this:

   python setup.py  build_ext --use-wx-python-swig-hack  build

You can also use it with the install_local command:

   python setup.py  build_ext --use-wx-python-swig-hack  install_local

Note, that this work-around relies on some wxPython internals and may
cease to work at some point.  We tested it with wxPython 2.4 and
wxPython 2.5.


License
-------

Thuban is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

However, some of the extension modules in the extension subdirectory are
licensed under other Free Software licenses. 
See the respective README files for details.
