Installing Xastir on Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS and other Debian Variants
These are the system-specific installation instructions for Ubuntu
24.04 LTS. The Xastir team tests on this platform through Github
Actions every time any change is made to the code, and these are the
precise packages the action installs each time.
We have confirmed that the install instructions here are also correct
for the latest Rasbperry Pi OS based on Debian 13 ("Trixie").
They are probably valid for other releases of Ubuntu, and
are very likely close for other Debian variants.
As we get more user input on the accuracy of that statement, we'll
update.
There is an Xastir package in the package manager
But at least for the Ubuntu LTS version 24.04 it's very old, version 2.2.0.
Raspberry Pi OS (Debian 13 "Trixie") also has version 2.2.0.
You are better off building from source.
Getting dependent libraries
To install packages on Ubuntu you use "apt install".
The following command should be sufficient to install all packages
needed for a complete build of Xastir on Ubuntu systems, plus those
necessary to set up and use AX.25 networking. Note that it
also loads some packages of X fonts that are expected by Xastir but
not part of a normal Ubuntu install.
sudo apt install build-essential autoconf automake xorg-dev libmotif-dev graphicsmagick libgraphicsmagick1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libpcre2-dev libdb-dev shapelib libshp-dev libxpm-dev libproj-dev festival festival-dev libgeotiff-dev gpsman gpsmanshp libcjson1 libcjson-dev xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi libax25-dev ax25-apps ax25-tools git
Ubuntu's libgeotiff package places the headers in a place that
Xastir's configure won't find them. So you need to give it a hint.
/path/to/Xastir/configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/geotiff"
Everything else is per the general building guidance
The remaining steps of building Xastir are exactly as provided in
Installing Xastir.
Useful tools
While the list of packages above is enough to get Xastir built with
all optional features, there are a few additional packages that can
come in handy if you want to roll your own maps.
- geotiff-bin: This is a package of applications that would
normally be installed with the geotiff library if you built it
from source, but the package management system has split out from
the libraries and development headers as a separate package
- gdal-bin: This will cause gdal libraries to be installed as well,
and provides tools that are part of the GDAL
package. These are advanced tools for manipulating map data, and
are referred to often in our [[advanced map
topics|Advanced-Map-Topics]] page.
You don't need these packages unless you're doing a lot of work
rolling your own maps.
How were these instructions tested?
The Xastir team has an automated testing setup on Github that checks
the Xastir build on several different systems. Ubuntu 24.04 is one of
them. This process launches a vanilla Ubuntu 24.04 virtual machine,
executes the apt install command above, then configures and builds
Xastir from source.
This process is run every time any change is made to the Xastir code.
We also checked it by hand
The apt install command was verified to be correct on Ubuntu 24.04 and
Raspberry Pi OS "Trixie" (the latest as of January 2026) on fresh
installs of Ubuntu 24.04 in a virtual machine and on a fresh install
of Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi 3b.
Some of the packages we list may already be installed
We provided this set of apt install instructions to make sure everything
we need is installed. We have found that some of them are already
installed by default on this system, so including them in the
instructions just means apt will skip over them.
