PSM students will be provided with laptops, but the laptops only have university-licensed software installed (ArcGIS, MS Office). Professors will be using a variety of FOSS (free and open source software) in various courses, and you will have administrative rights to install the required software on your computers. (Non-PSM students in certain courses will have to provide their own laptops and also install the required software.)

QGIS

QGIS, is an open source GIS software comparable to ArcGIS. Installation instructions for Win/Mac/Linux are available at Prof. Hachadoorian’s Open Geospatial Technologies blog: Getting Oriented to QGIS. On Windows, the recommended installation method is the OSGeo4W suite.

Note that the instructions for QGIS include a lot of supporting software, including GDAL/OGR and SQLite/SpatiaLite, which will also come into play even when we are not using QGIS.

Useful Plugins

These can be installed by going to Plugins → Manage and Install Plugins…

• Contour
• Geocoding
• MMQGIS
• Point Sampling Tool
• qgis2web
• QuickMapServices
• QuickWKT

QGIS 3.0 represented a major change in the code base for QGIS, and broke compatibility with many plugins. Below are a list of plugins previously recommended which are not available in QGIS 3.x. They are still available for the current Long-Term Release, QGIS 2.18, and their developers may yet make them available for 3.x.

• FlowMapper
• Heatmap
• Spatial Query
• XyTools

R & RStudio

Several courses, including the required GUS 5162 Advanced Statistics for Urban Applications, make use of the R statistical language. RStudio is an optional but extremely useful IDE.

Installing

• R (http://cran.rstudio.com/) – Note, there’s a lot of text on this site, but you really only need one file, based on your operating system:
  • Windows (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/)
  • Mac (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/)
    • For some reason the Mac installer downloads as an “Unknown” file on some people’s laptops. If it does this, rename the file to anything that ends .pkg and Mac Installer will be able to run it.
• RStudio (https://rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/)

Useful Libraries

When you install, click Yes to create a “personal library”. Install with

install.packages("<library name>", dep=TRUE)

• tidyverse — This is a metapackage which bundles several other packages for data management and visualization: broom, dplyr, forcats, ggplot2, haven, httr, hms, jsonlite, lubridate, magrittr, modelr, purrr, readr, readxl, stringr, tibble, rvest, tidyr, xml2
• sf
• tmap
• sp
• RColorBrewer

GeoDa

http://geodacenter.github.io/download.html

pgAdmin

https://www.pgadmin.org/download/