Ubuntu ships only with libgeoip 1.4.8 :-(

[sjn]

Would it be possible to make Geo::IP a little more lenient until the Ubuntu people catch up? :)

[autarch]

Hi, Salve,

Unfortunately the Geo::IP Perl module is tied very tightly to the internals of libGeoIP, so this isn't really possible. You have a few options:

• Use an older version of Geo::IP - Geo::IP 1.4.0 will work with libGeoIP 1.4.8
• Use Geo::IP::PurePerl - it's slower, though
• Compile libGeoIP from scratch - this shouldn't be too hard - by default it installs to /usr/local/lib so it won't overwrite any packages
• Try installing the Debian experimental package - http://packages.debian.org/experimental/libgeoip-dev - I honestly have no idea if this can work, though.

We are discussing creating a libGeoIP PPA at some point, but I can't promise whether we will do this, or when.

We do recognize that this is a poor design and we're doing our best to avoid this sort of problem for GeoIP2, which is currently under development. Many of the things that require a new libGeoIP release are now simply data elements in the databases under GeoIP2, which uses a much more flexible file format.

However, it will be a little while yet before we offer GeoIP2 downloadable databases. Our initial focus for GeoIP2 is on our web services. With that said, we will be launching those web services soon, and we will be providing a supported client library in Perl for using the service. You can see it on GitHub at https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-perl

Thanks so much for your interest in our GeoIP products, and please let me know if you have any other questions. I'll leave this issue open since it is a real bug, and it's worth making it easier to find.

[oschwald]

I would just rebuild the Debian package on your version of Ubuntu. If you have a fairly recent version of Ubuntu, this should probably work. You can either download the source files from the Debian website, or you can add the experimental source repo (the deb-src line, not the deb line) to your sources.list and run 'apt-get update && apt-get build-dep libgeoip1 && apt-get source -b libgeoip1'.