2 replies to this topic

[whoopn]

Hello, cool forum.

So first off I am fairly new to the cartography scene so my knowledge is limited to a basic understanding of all the vocabulary involved.

Here is my problem (I am fairly tech savvy, but definitely not a Linux guru):

I want to read ECW files in Quantum GIS (another program would be fine but it needs to have the tools that QGIS has. I am running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) with all the most recent updates. I am an intermediate in compiling programs myself so I would be willing to do this but I need instructions that are exact so I don't miss any steps.

Well thank you in advance...

[mdsumner]

If you can live with QGIS reading a different format (I'm not familiar with QGIS) you could convert your ECW to something else with www.gdal.org

GDAL installation by FWTools is trivial.

Is it in ECW because it's realy big? Do you need to stay in ECW?

[rmcculley]

If I'm not mistaken, gdal-bin is in the default ubuntu repository (I know it is in Debian, so I'm assuming Ubuntu as well). You should be able to apt-get install gdal-bin, and then use gdal_translate to convert the image to another format (I'd recommend GTiff unless you have space issues).

You could recompile qgis to support ecw, but I'm not sure it is worth the pain unless you absolutely have to keep the image in ecw format.