In this article, I want to look at a GIS option available for Linux—specifically, a program called SAGA (System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses). SAGA was developed at the Department of Physical Geography in Germany. It is built with a plugin module architecture, where various functions are provided by individual modules. A very complete API is available to allow users to extend SAGA's functionality with newly written modules. I take a very cursory look at SAGA here and describe a few things you might want to do with it.

I've already looked at some GIS applications available on Linux. Programs like GRASS and qgis provide a full set of tools to do GIS. Sometimes, that's really overkill though. You may just want to display some data geographically and create a map. For those cases, there is Thuban, an interactive geographic data viewer.