Live GIS Disc

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The Live DVD contains a collection of the best Geospatial Open Source software, pre-configured with sample data. The DVD is available for download at http://download.osgeo.org/livedvd.


Communication

The mailing list is archived here and at Gmane

Infrastructure

It would be nice if in addition to hosting those ISOs the site could host torrent trackers as well.
  • Bug, wish, and task tracker: TODO
For now we might be able to host that at OSGeo's Trac, but there would need to be a "LiveDemo" component added or we'd need to have our own trac instance set up.

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.

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.

More information on our packaging efforts can be found here: Live GIS Disc Packages

Scripts and Tutorials

Besides debian-packages the project tries to provide scripts and tutorials on how to create a Live DVD. This will help interested people to create their own Live DVD customized for their personal needs.

Available Tutorials, Scripts, Instructions...

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.

Future Targets

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

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

How to contribute?

Current efforts have concentrated around Remastersys and monolithic ISO edits.

Collaborating on such a Live DVD is not that simple. Basically, only one person at a time can work on the image. Also up- and downloading gigabyte sized ISO-images is rather tedious. This was one of the reasons why we decided to package everything that is supposed to go on the DVD in modular Debian-packages.

So the best and easiest way to contribute is to create packages for geospatial applications that have not been packaged yet, for sample data, configurations or examples. Packages for Java software are especially needed, due to the history of Java support in Debian has only recently been added, so official packages are few.

Also this allows everyone who wants to create a customized version of the Live DVD to install all the packages, examples, and data they want and create their own ISO-image.

  • Suggestion: Base our efforts around the Debian live-helper package. We would only need to maintain config files and data fetching build scripts in DebianGIS's or OSGeo's SVN. Additional hook scripts could build/install any additional software we require on the disc. This approach also makes it trivial to change the default language or setup and eliminates the need to volley gigabyte sized ISOs between different development centers.

Available Live Discs

FOSS4G 2009

October 2009:

This FOSS4G 2009 Live DVD will be handed out to all delegates at the FOSS4G 2009 conference in Sydney, Australia, 20-23 October 2009.

Arramagong LiveDVD

November 2008:

Currently LISAsoft is working on the Arramagong Live DVD, which was initially based on Ominiverdi's Live CD.

Arramagong is, like Ominiverdi's Live DVD, based on Xubuntu (currently v8.04). Arrmagong adds a variety of geospatial software to it. This software is preconfigured and comes with sample data and projects, so after booting from the DVD, they can be immediately tested.

Recently LISAsoft released the a first beta version of Arramagong 1.0.

Arramagong Links

FOSS4G 2008 LiveDVD

September 2008:

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

build scripts in SVN
  • Portable GIS - Zero-install GIS for MS Windows on a USB stick

Links to Build tool options

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