gdal - ECW support in GeoServer?

I am trying to add ECW support into Geoserver 2.1.1 (also tried 1.7.7) but no luck so far.

Does anyone have a step by step guide to add the ECW support ? (the one

However, my understanding is that Geoserver 2.1.1 uses imageio-ext that uses gdal-1.4.5

I am now lost between gdal version, geoserver version, imageio-ext version etc etc

This is what my gdal_native dir looks like http://i.stack.imgur.com/yEFpp.png (where libecwj2.dll is copied from http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/attachment/ticket/2200/libecwj2.zip)

Answer

From my post in http://osgeo-org.1803224.n2.nabble.com/Installing-Geoserver-2-1-1-with-ECW-support-td6606101.html

Geoserver 2.1.1 with ECW (v3.3) support

1. 
   
   

   Download Geoserver 2.1.1 from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/geoserver/geoserver-2.1.1-bin.zip 1a. extract to c:\bin\geoserver

   
   


2. 
   

   Download imageio 1.1.1 installer from http://java.net/projects/imageio-ext/downloads/download/Releases/ImageIO-Ext/1.1.x/1.1.1/windowsInstaller/windows32-imageio-ext-installer-gdal-mrsid-ecw-1.1.1.zip 2b. Install it to c:\imageio 2c. Remove c:\bin\geoserver\webapps\geoserver\WEB-INF\lib\imageio-ext-1.0.8 2d. Copy c:\imageio\lib*.* to c:\bin\geoserver\webapps\geoserver\WEB-INF\lib (imageio installer will also copy gdal dll, ecw sdk dll to your java\bin directory)

   
   

3.Add Environment variables for GDAL_DATA c:\imageio\gdaldata GDAL_DRIVER_PATH c:\imageio\gdalplugin

4.Start geoserver