If you want to use BPS on Windows, just take a look at the Windows Installation section below. BPS can run on Linux and Mac too. Installation on Mac can be tricky and if you want to go that route, you’ll have to go it alone using the Linux Installation section below as a guide. If you have questions, please email the author using the link at the bottom of this page. Bugs and feature requests can be posted to the BPS issue tracker.

Windows Installation

Installing BPS on Windows is simply a matter of downloading a zip file, uncompressing it, and double clicking the bps_gui.exe executable file. The only caveat is that bps_gui.exe must not be moved from its directory. Here are the necessary steps in excruciating detail:

  1. Direct your web browser to the latest BPS release and download bps_windows.zip.

  2. Unzip the bps_gui directory onto your hard drive. You can put it wherever you’d like but these instructions will assume it’s going to C:\bps_gui.

    • Double click the bps_windows.zip file that you downloaded
    • Right click the bps_gui folder and choose copy
    • Navigate to C:\ (or wherever you want) and paste the bps_gui folder

  3. Navigate to the C:\bps_gui and double click bps_gui.exe (this may show up as bps_gui if Windows is configured to hide extensions). A command prompt will open followed by the BPS application. The command prompt window will stay open in the background and display some extra information that you are free to completely ignore.

  4. That’s it! Just remember to always run BPS from within the bps_gui folder. It needs all those other files in the same directory in order to function. Check out the Tutorial section of the Documentation to learn how to set your preferences and start using BPS.

Linux Installation

BPS was developed on Ubuntu. The following installation steps were tested on 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04:

  1. Satisfy the prerequisites for BPS by entering the following commands in the terminal (you may need to use sudo to get the necessary permissions):

     apt-get update
 apt-get install python-scipy python-matplotlib python-qt4 python-gdal python-pip git python-pyexiv2
 pip install pynmea slugify

  2. Direct your web browser to the latest BPS release and download and extract the source code. I felt compelled to detail how to extract an archive for the Windows users but you’re using Ubuntu so I’m going to assume you can take care of it.

  3. Go to the bps_package directory and run python bps_gui.py.

  4. That should start BPS. Check out the Tutorial section of the Documentation to learn how to set your preferences and start using BPS.

If you want the very latest version, you can just do step 1 and then go to the BPS Repository and clone it. If you do that, there’s no guarantee that BPS will work with out crashing. …actually, there are no guarantees of any kind with any version of BPS but the development version is likely to be less stable than the release version.