Reading "ArcGrid" formated geological data on Debian? Alternatives?

[Brett Viren <bv@bnl.gov>]

Any geographers in the house?

I need an elevation map for a particular region (China mainland near
Hong Kong) and I found that the US Geological Survey supplies some
data from the "Shuttle Radar Topography Mission".  However, for the
region of interest it is only available in a proprietary format called
"ArcGrid" aka "ESRI Shapefile".

I'm pretty ignorant of this field and am hoping there are experts here
that can suggest any Free Software and/or Debian packages I'm missing
that will allow unpacking this format into an accessible form I can
use in my own software.  I found the Debian package "gdal-bin" but the
best I can figure out is it only allows unpacking summary information
(via gdalinfo).

So, any suggestions on software?  Or, maybe there is another source of
high resolution (100m or better) topographic data I should look at?


Thanks!
-Brett.

PS: If it helps, the data pack I downloaded from USGS is here:

http://www.phy.bnl.gov/~bviren/dayabay/elevation/84605319.zip