This is an experimental application for using Geonames data within GeoDjango.

Furthermore this is a fork of ramusus django-geonames, containing some (osx specific) fixes:

• setup.py includes geonames/sql/* as package_data
• load_geonames checks to see if its run on OSX <= 10.6.7, because zcat has a bug there, so we use gzcat instead. Hopefully this gets fixed with 10.7

I also encounter some weird error: syncdb wouldnt create the tables specified by geonames/models.py. I didnt find the reason why this happens. However heres a workaround in case you encounter this too:

• add geonames to your INSTALLED_APPS (as you would anyway)
• now do python manage.py sqlall geonames and copy the sql from the output
• run python manage.py dbshell, paste the copied sql and execute it
• now that we have our tables created, you can follow the installation instructions

Note that running all this can take some serious time. The database is pretty huge (~200mb WITHOUT alternateNames, which itself weights in at ~94mb). So you might want to do load_geonames over night, it did take my macbook 18h28min to complete with a default 5200rpm drive, you might find it a hell lot faster with a 7200rpm drive or some SSD.

1. Add geonames to your INSTALLED_APPS
2. python manage.py syncdb so it creates the tables
3. python manage.py download_geonames will download all the data you might need (and more)
4. python manage.py compress_geonames -- This will gzip the downloaded data, to minimize disk I/O during sql read.
5. python manage.py load_geonames -- Load the data.
6. Hours later: have fun ;-)