These instructions apply for Fedora 9 and GeoDjango on django1.0 and mysql 5.0.51. These are the problems I ran into trying to get GeoDjango running = Third Party Library Installation = Download and untar the geos lib {{{ $ wget http://download.osgeo.org/geos/geos-3.0.0.tar.bz2 $ tar xjf geos-3.0.0.tar.bz2 }}} Next, change into the directory where GEOS was unpacked, run the configure script and attempt to run the make script {{{ $ ./configure $ make }}} If make fails, I think it's due to gcc 4.3.0 not liking the includes for some of the files. You can download the latest svn drop (3.1.0) and that should compile OR you can make the changes in the 3.0.0 source code by following the diff's on this page: http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=149838&action=view (i.e. add the lines starting with a '+' and remove the lines starting with a '-' from the respective file) Once you have made it successfully, install it {{{ # make install }}} Install [GeoDjangoInstall#PROJ.4 PROJ.4] and [GeoDjangoInstall#GDAL GDAL] according to the [GeoDjangoInstall#GeoDjangoInstallation main installation page] Test that the GEOS libraries are where they should be by changing to a django project directory and importing the models from django.contrib.gis.db {{{ $ python manage.py shell Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jun 15 2008, 18:24:56) [GCC 4.3.0 20080428 (Red Hat 4.3.0-8)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. (InteractiveConsole) >>> from django.contrib.gis.db import models }}} If you get no errors, it's all good! If you get this (at the bottom of the stack trace) {{{ ... File "/usr/lib64/python2.5/ctypes/__init__.py", line 340, in __init__ self._handle = _dlopen(self._name, mode) OSError: libgeos_c.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory }}} Add /usr/local/lib to the dynamic linker run-time bindings {{{ echo '/usr/local/lib' >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local-lib.conf ldconfig }}}