Export osm files to shape files

Shape files of ESRI is a standard geospatial way of representing points, lines and polygons . Its maintained by ESRI and is a open specification .More details at shapefile @ wikipedia .

I have used Qgis before but remember that was on a debian box where everything worked . Now on ubuntu 10.10 Qgis did work but without the python support . Python support is needed for OSM plugin to work .

I tried some things like :

* Use a latest version via ppa
* Use a dev version via dev ppa

Finally fed up searching for a solution , I downloaded the source and built it via the instructions in INSTALL file .

After the python support enabled I was lost looking for a python plugin location .

OSM plugin did come by default and I had to tick it to enable it .

Then importing an OSM file and exporting it to shapefile was baby steps .

Virtual box is nice

I have used qemu before and also glanced at virtualbox but this time I was using it for real .

encountered this when booting a 64 bit edition iso :

VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration has been enabled, but is not operational. Your 64-bit guest will fail to detect a 64-bit CPU and will not be able to boot.
Please ensure that you have enabled VT-x/AMD-V properly in the BIOS of your host computer.

I thought a reboot would load all required kernel modules , but I rebooted primarily to get into BIOS which I could not in first attempt .

No a reboot didn't help , hence went this time patiently to the BIOS and enabled the intel virtualisation support and hurray it worked !

Networking: The default NAT mode is suitable for basic usage like : ping outside and connect to internet . But I wanted to ping from my machine to VM which I couldn't do with the NAT mode . Hence I had to go for bridged mode .

For which I installed bridge-utils package and configured my /etc/network/interfaces to add bridge entries . Then in my VM config I changed it to bridge where I selected the bridge device br0 . Now both real and virtual machines have Ip addresses !

The rest was plain simple .. everything was matter of clicks , things did come a long way !!