newbie question and problem installing basemap

Linux and Unix-Like Fedora
1

Hi,
Bit of a newbie question first. I have fedora installed as a partition on a lenovo G570 laptop. When I type

uname -a

I get,

Linux David 3.2.6-3.fc16.i686 #1 SMP Mon Feb 13 20:52:22 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

the man page tells me this is
sysname = Linux
nodename = David
release = 3.2.6-3.fc16.i686
version = #1 SMP Mon Feb 13 20:52:22 UTC 2012
machine = i686
my first question is why does i386 appear with uname -a??

The real problem I have though is installing basemap (a python mapping package). I've been following the instructions found on the here. I already had the pre-requisites installed so just downloaded and untared basemap-1.0.2, then cd to the directory.
To install the geos library it tells you to set the environment variable to the path to the directory containing both libgeos_c and geos_c.h. So I used find -a to locate them.

[davcra@David basemap-1.0.2]$ find -name geos_c.h
 ./geos-3.3.1/capi/geos_c.h
 [davcra@David basemap-1.0.2]$ find -name libgeos_c
 [davcra@David basemap-1.0.2]$

as you can see the second one returns nothing.
I tried setting the environment variable to

GEOS_DIR=/home/davcra/basemap-1.0.2/geos-3.3.1/capi/

but when I run the following

./configure --prefix=$GEOS_DIR

I get this error,

checking build system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
 checking host system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
 checking target system type... i686-pc-linux-gnu
 checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
 checking whether build environment is sane... yes
 checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
 checking for gawk... gawk
 checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
 checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no
 checking for gcc... gcc
 checking whether the C compiler works... no
 configure: error: in `/home/davcra/basemap-1.0.2/geos-3.3.1':
 configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
 See `config.log' for more details

No idea what to do now and hoping someone can help!
thanks
David

2

you need to provide the path name under which fnd will make its search .

try like the below one

find ~ -name libgeos_c -print
3

Hi, I tried

find ~ -name libgeos_c -print

but still doesnt return anything.

---------- Post updated at 05:47 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:58 PM ----------

Hi again,
so the solution is to ignore the website and just

---------- Post updated 26-02-12 at 04:52 PM ---------- Previous update was 25-02-12 at 05:47 PM ----------

then again maybe it isnt,:wall:
I used yum to install basemap but it doesnt seem to have installed the latest version. yum info gives,

[davcra@David ~]$ sudo yum info python-basemap.i686
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Installed Packages
Name        : python-basemap
Arch        : i686
Version     : 0.99.4
Release     : 12.fc16
Size        : 1.6 M
Repo        : installed
From repo   : fedora
Summary     : Plots data on map projections (with continental and political
            : boundaries)
URL         : Toolkits � Matplotlib v1.0.1 documentation
License     : LGPLv2+
Description : Basemap is a matplotlib toolkit that allows you to plot data on
            : map projections (with continental and political boundaries).

but sourceforge has basemap-1.0.2, which is what I need. Anyone know why that might be?? and if I can use yum to get the latest version.
Thanks
D