Release of LAStools@Linux

Von / 23. November 2022

We announce the release of LAStools@Linux. Please read the following instructions carefully to complete the installation.

Download

Download the binaries from https://downloads.rapidlasso.de/lastools.tar.gz and unzip the package.

Docker script

To build your environment you need to provide some dependent external libraries. We didn’t create a universal docker but share a docker script (special thanks to Mark Robinson!), so you can create it yourself or use the commands. This is probably the easiest way to provide all the necessary dependencies.

Dependencies

Optionally, you can go through them one by one. These are the libs we link against:

: jpg – version: 62 / 6b

https://sourceforge.net/projects/libjpeg/files/libjpeg/6b/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz/download

: tiff – tiff_api64/tiff.lib – version: 4.0.9

http://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/tiff-4.0.9.tar.gz

or see https://libtiff.gitlab.io/libtiff/

: png – version: 14

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/   

https://github.com/glennrp/libpng

: geotiff – version: 1430

http://download.osgeo.org/geotiff/libgeotiff/libgeotiff-1.4.3.tar.gz    

or  https://github.com/OSGeo/libgeotiff/releases/tag/1.4.3

./libgeotiff/bin

: glibc – 2.29

If you use another glibc version on your machine and cannot update to this version, you may run an alternative GLIBC library:

mkdir ~/glibc_install; cd ~/glibc_install
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/glibc-2.29.tar.gz
tar zxvf glibc-2.29.tar.gz
cd glibc-2.29
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --prefix=/opt/glibc-2.29
make -j4
sudo make install

then, run the command:

     LD_PRELOAD=/opt/glibc-2.29/lib/libm.so.6 ./lasinfo64

this will load the libm.so.6 of the required version.

Licensing

If you don’t own a commercial license, the same limitations apply as in the Windows version: The number of points is limited, usually to 3 million points. If you own a license, place your license file („lastoolslicense.txt“) in the .\LAStools\bin directory of the distribution.

Outlook

We are still in the process of optimizing LAStools@Linux in many aspects. However, once you have completed the installation described, you can already run all the tools under Linux.

  • The -gui option has not been ported because most users run LAStools@Linux on the command line for batch processing.
  • Multi-core option support is a high priority – this will be done soon.
  • Upgrades to newer versions of the external dependencies are made over time.

Technical background

The build was done on an Intel x64 Debian 11 Linux.
We test against Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.

Warranty

Kindly note our license agreement. Please check all your results always carefully.

Feedback

Suggestions for optimizing LAStools@Linux or this documentation are welcome. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Happy LAStooling@Linux!

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