Building Mapnik Trunk on Debian 5 (Lenny)

Given a vanilla install of lenny...

Install Packages for dependencies

sudo apt-get install -y g++ cpp \
libboost1.35-dev \
libxml2 libxml2-dev \
libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev \
libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev \
libltdl3 libltdl3-dev \
libpng12-0 libpng12-dev \
libgeotiff-dev libtiff4 libtiff4-dev \
libcairo2 libcairo2-dev python-cairo python-cairo-dev \
libcairomm-1.0-1 libcairomm-1.0-dev \
ttf-dejavu ttf-dejavu-core ttf-dejavu-extra \
libgdal1-dev python-gdal \
postgresql-8.3-postgis postgresql-8.3 \
postgresql-server-dev-8.3 postgresql-contrib-8.3 \
libsqlite3-dev  \
subversion build-essential python-nose

Install Mapnik trunk

svn co http://svn.mapnik.org/tags/release-0.7.1/ mapnik
cd mapnik
python scons/scons.py configure INPUT_PLUGINS=all \
OPTIMIZATION=3 \
SYSTEM_FONTS=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/
python scons/scons.py
sudo python scons/scons.py install
sudo ldconfig

If scons fails to detect some boost libraries, be sure to install libboost1.35-filesystem-dev, libboost1.35-iostreams-dev, etc as required (look at the scons output). You might try using a different version of libboost (e.g. libboost-1.38-dev and libboost1.38-foo-dev).

Build and install mapnik without root permissions

The development libraries have to be present as described above. In the following example /home/$USER/mapnik_svn ($DIR_MAPNIK_SVN) is the directory where you want to check out the source and /home/$USER/mapnik_inst (DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL) is the directory you want to use for installation.

DIR_MAPNIK_SRC=/home/$USER/mapnik_svn
DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL=/home/$USER/mapnik_inst

svn co http://svn.mapnik.org/trunk $DIR_MAPNIK_SVN
cd $DIR_MAPNIK_SVN

python scons/scons.py configure INPUT_PLUGINS=all \
OPTIMIZATION=3 \
SYSTEM_FONTS=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/ \
PREFIX=$DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL \
PYTHON_PREFIX=$DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL
python scons/scons.py
python scons/scons.py install

# append the following lines to /home/$USER/.bashrc
DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL=/home/$USER/mapnik_inst
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL/lib
export PYTHONPATH=$DIR_MAPNIK_INSTALL/lib/python2.5/site-packages