Like many Open Source packages, Mapserver relies on external libraries to handle much of the heavy lifting. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that the Mapserver folks don't have to program all the needed functionality, the bad thing is that you can reach dependency-hell with this setup. For our purposes, we will only build with Proj.4 support, but you can rebuild mapserver later to link with other libraries for more functionality.
Proj.4 provides projection and reprojection support for Mapserver. Building and installing is hopefully simple, if you have ever built an open source package before. Make sure that /usr/local/lib is included in /etc/ld.so.conf, so that Mapserver can link to that library without special configuration.
$ wget ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/pub/proj/proj-4.4.8.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf proj-4.4.8.tar.gz
$ cd proj-4.4.8
$ ./configure; make
$ su -l
# make install #(as root, to install in /usr/local!)
# /sbin/ldconfig
# exit
$ make clean
If everything went well, you should notice a libproj in /usr/local/lib that mapserver can link to.
As I write this (28 Jul 2004), Mapserver is at version 4.2.1 . It is preferable that you be running this version for this HOWTO, but it is not required. For our purposes, the only difference between the current version 4.2.1 and the old 3.6.x versions is the 'OFFSITE' keyword in the .map file. In Mapserver 4.x, this is a RGB value and in Mapserver 3.x, this is a color map index value.
$ wget http://cvs.gis.umn.edu/dist/mapserver-4.2.1.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf mapserver-4.2.1.tar.gz
$ cd mapserver-4.2.1
$ ./configure --with-proj --with-png
$ make
$ cp -i mapserv /var/www/cgi-bin/mapserv
Now, if the build process worked, you should have a binary called 'mapserv' if your current working directory. Verify that the mapserv binary is okay by executing
$ ./mapserv -v
If you got this far with these instructions, you are much smarter than I am. Since I couldn't even get this to work following my own instructions. Anyway, we now have a CGI application that we can install on our webserver and begin building a web mapping application! Yeah!