Live GIS Disc

Long Term Plan

Following the BOF session on 1 Oct, 2008 in Cape Town (and IRC), we've developed a broad plan for the future of the LiveDVD project. I will attempt to summarise it.

Use Cases

There are multiple use cases for this product:

• Demo DVD that can be handed out at conferences.
  This will contain a wide variety of applications, preconfigured with some sample data and containing introductory tutorials. It should be able to function completely offline, at least within the scope of the tutorials, and should provide an introduction to many products. This is very much a Live DVD, and as such should be conservative with regards to size (it will be run from RAM).
• Education DVD
  This seems to be a more involved version than the Demo DVD, including more involved material, including train-the-trainer style material. This is targeted at those who will be teaching others, be it in workshops or university classes/labs. My expectation (mleslie: feel free to correct me) is that this is more likely to be installed on machines and used as a teaching resource, as opposed to a toy to play with, as with the Demo DVD. This will require material developed through the.
• Workstation Install DVD
  This need was seen in Cape Town, where the bandwidth seems to be a very limiting factor. Using the DVD to install either a complete OS, a set of packages to an existing Linux, or Windows installers completely offline is of great value in the developing world. Would it be of greater value to lose the Edu or demo material and put in complete application documentation?

Packaging

The way forward was seen to require some proper packaging of every module used in the various products. This means that every application needs to be packaged in a .deb file. Datasets will be packaged in their own .deb files. Application configurations, tutorials, documentation, education materials and the like would then be packaged separately, with dependencies defined to ensure the data and applications they need are in place.

• Basic rules of reuse apply. If the same application configuration is used by more than one tutorial, it belongs in it's own package.
• Standard version numbering is required to ensure compatibility as tutorials are updated.
• Packages should be compatible with both Ubuntu and Debian
• OSGeo should host a package repository for this work
• Applications should target release to official Debian repositories as a long-term goal

Once these packages are created, it will be fairly easy to cut special-purpose images containing subsets of the available packages. Standard images can be defined using 'virtual packages' that only contain dependencies.

Next Steps

Live_GIS_Disc_Packages documents what is currently available through Debian repositories and OSGeo repositories, and what still needs to be packaged.

The immediate steps (as of 2 Oct, 2008) are:

• Get a repository up and running (Tim Bowden as volunteered as repo maintainer, with guidance from Chris Schmidt)
• Complete the proper packaging of everything that made it on to the FOSS4G 2008 version
• Prod the Edu group for content that can be packaged.
• Create a discussion list (see also this)

Future Targets

Here is an attempt at a list of milestones that should have DVD image releases.

• GIS Day 2008, November 19th 2008
• FOSS4G 2009, November 2009

FOSS4G 2008 LiveDVD

The discussion and planning for the FOSS4G 2008 LiveDVD has been archived here.

The index page of the DVD is now here.

The DVD is available for download at http://download.osgeo.org/livedvd.

Links to related projects

• DebianGIS Live Image

build scripts in SVN

• Omniverdi LiveCD project
• List of live CDs from the GRASS download site

Links to Build tool options

• live-helper
• Gnewsense method
• Remastersys
• Debian\Ubuntu Tricks
• Ubuntu Help Way