Gtopo is just a viewer, it does not come with maps.
(I hope you are not disappointed to discover this at this stage.)
To use gtopo, you will need to own
or have access to a set of the NGS TOPO! series of maps on CD for the
state or states that you are interested in. You can sometimes find
these for a decent price on Amazon marketplace or Ebay, or your local
used book store.
Of course, you can also buy them full price (typically $100 per state).
Decide where on your machine you want to put all of your map data. With on the order of 0.6 Gigabyte per CD, this can add up (although in this age of 500G disks, this is hardly a big issue). This could be /home/topo or /topo or any place you find handy and logical. I would suggest /home/topo since gtopo will by default look there, but it is easy to add directories to the list that gtopo searches.
Note also that you can split up the archive. This might be handy (as it was for me), if you have a small disk in an old laptop, with two partitions, each with something like 3G of free space. In my case I put arizona maps in /u1/topo and california maps in /topo. As long as you tell gtopo about all the places where your stash maps, it will handle this all transparently for you and will build one index to all of the various places where you put maps.
Looking at this another way, you can put maps in any or all of the places that gtopo knows about, and it joins them all into one big happy archive. Look at the settings file documentation for details.
Gtopo expects to find the contents of each CD in its own directory in the archive. It also expects each of these directories to have a name like xx_d01, where "xx" is a two letter abbreviation for the state.
At this point in time, gtopo is quite rigid about what it expects to find on disk. Directories that don't follow this pattern (names with 6 characters and a "_" as the third character) are ignored. I have some ideas about how to relax these requirements, but for now this is how it is. If you create directories for each CD and copy them as described below, everthing should work, but let me know if you find surprises.
Copy the CD's to your archive using a command something like this:
mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom cp -var /media/cdrom/az_d02 /home/topoHow and where the CD gets mounted will depend on how your system is set up, and what linux variant you are running. My latest Fedora Core system mounts the CD automatically when I insert it (so I don't need the mount command), and mounts it at a location like /media/cdrom. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. When the smoke clears from the above, you will find a directory with a name like /home/topo/az_d02 or /home/topo/AZ_D02. Don't worry about whether the name is upper or lower case. I have found that I can skip the first CD of each set, saving some disk space. It seems that CD number 1 of each set mostly holds the TOPO! software, which you don't care about. It also holds the large scale map images, but these are duplicated on all the other CD's on all of the state sets I own, but let me know if your experience is significantly different.
Repeat this process for each CD, and go ahead and include the CD 1 if you have space. If you find the directory SI_D01, you are in luck! (I found this on disk 1 of my circa 2006 Nevada Set.) This holds the entire United States at level 1, 2, and 3. Worth scrounging around to find if you don't already have it.
When you are all done, your /topo directory will look something like this:
dr-xr-xr-x 10 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D01 dr-xr-xr-x 17 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D02 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D03 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D04 dr-xr-xr-x 13 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D05 dr-xr-xr-x 13 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D06 dr-xr-xr-x 16 tom tom 4096 Sep 26 2002 AZ_D07 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 Jul 24 2001 AZ_D08 dr-xr-xr-x 10 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 CA_D01 dr-xr-xr-x 14 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 CA_D06 dr-xr-xr-x 17 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 CA_D08 dr-xr-xr-x 20 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 CA_D10 dr-xr-xr-x 16 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 ca_d02 dr-xr-xr-x 14 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 ca_d03 dr-xr-xr-x 17 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 ca_d04 dr-xr-xr-x 16 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 ca_d05 dr-xr-xr-x 14 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 ca_d07 dr-xr-xr-x 17 tom tom 4096 Oct 24 2001 ca_d09 dr-xr-xr-x 10 tom tom 4096 Sep 21 2001 nm_d01 dr-xr-xr-x 18 tom tom 4096 May 7 2003 nm_d02 dr-xr-xr-x 16 tom tom 4096 May 6 2003 nm_d03 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 May 6 2003 nm_d04 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 May 7 2003 nm_d05 dr-xr-xr-x 14 tom tom 4096 May 6 2003 nm_d06 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 May 6 2003 nm_d07 dr-xr-xr-x 15 tom tom 4096 May 6 2003 nm_d08 dr-xr-xr-x 13 tom tom 4096 May 6 2003 nm_d09 dr-xr-xr-x 4 tom tom 4096 Jan 10 2006 nv_d01 dr-xr-xr-x 13 tom tom 4096 Dec 10 2005 nv_d02 dr-xr-xr-x 11 tom tom 4096 Dec 10 2005 nv_d03 dr-xr-xr-x 11 tom tom 4096 Dec 10 2005 nv_d04 dr-xr-xr-x 9 tom tom 4096 Dec 10 2005 nv_d05 dr-xr-xr-x 11 tom tom 4096 Dec 10 2005 nv_d06 dr-xr-xr-x 12 tom tom 4096 Dec 10 2005 nv_d07 dr-xr-xr-x 10 tom tom 4096 Oct 18 2000 ut_d01 dr-xr-xr-x 16 tom tom 4096 Oct 18 2000 ut_d02 dr-xr-xr-x 14 tom tom 4096 Oct 20 2000 ut_d03 dr-xr-xr-x 13 tom tom 4096 Oct 20 2000 ut_d04 dr-xr-xr-x 19 tom tom 4096 Oct 20 2000 ut_d05 dr-xr-xr-x 17 tom tom 4096 Oct 18 2000 ut_d06This is what I have on my hard disk, which has Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. You can load only the CD's you like, there is no reason to load all the CD's, and as I have said, you can safely skip loading CD 1 for each state. Note however that I found SI_D01 on disk 1 of my Nevada set.
Gtopo / tom@mmto.org