I’ve been asked about producing shapefiles from the geo data on Variable Pitch. This seems like a good idea, but having no experience with such files I thought maybe I should have an app to test them with. I was pointed at QGis but it needed to be added to the sources list for Ubuntu 13.10. This is how I did it.

I created a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qgis.list with the contents

deb http://qgis.org/debian saucy main
deb-src http://qgis.org/debian saucy main

Then I imported the PGP key as the sources are signed.

~$ gpg –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv 47765B75
gpg: requesting key 47765B75 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
gpg: key 47765B75: public key “Quantum GIS Archive Automatic Signing Key (2013) qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.org” imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)
~$ gpg –export –armor 47765B75 | sudo apt-key add –
OK

This was all that was needed and so installation was then as simple as

~ sudo apt-get update
~ sudo apt-get install qgis python-qgis

There are a large number of required packages!