I'm trying to use the admin1 dataset from the NaturalEarthData website. The site offers this data as both shapefiles and GeoDB. The shapefile attribute data is apparently encoded in Windows-1252 and a lot of the characters in some of the attribute data I need are just '?' characters.
The NaturalEarthData site mentions that:
The GeoDB format preserves local scripts better than SHP format.
I built GDAL against the FileGDB SDK from ArcGIS and verified the GDAL FGDB driver is working correctly using this link:
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/FileGDB
But I can't open files from NaturalEarthData. I always get the following error:
Unable to open datasource `ne_10m_admin_1_states_provinces.gdb' with the following drivers
...
FileGDB
...
I don't have access to ArcGIS. Am I doing something wrong? Is there any way I can access the GeoDB data?