OSGeo Binary Distribution

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This is a proposal for a project to develop an OSGeo "branded and certified" binary distribution of open source geospatial software for Windows, Linux and possibly MacOS X and Solaris.

Rationale

Objectives

Offer a painless user experience installing and getting started with OSGeo products.

  • Support major operating systems. In order of precidence that likely means Windows, Linux (Intel32), MacOS X and Solaris (Sparc).
  • Ensure that all components are inter-compatible avoiding version incompatibility hell.
  • Allow progressive installation, with packages pulled over the internet as requested. So the person can install a few packages without having to download everything, and so they can go back and add more packages later.
  • Provide an easy to use GUI installer.
  • Be relatively distribution/version agnostic - on linux we hope the same binaries will work on Debian, Fedora Core, Suse, Ubuntu, etc. On windows and MacOS X we hope the binaries would work across a variety of relatively recent OS versions.
  • Include at least all the OSGeo project software as packages, and dependencies of those packages.
  • Suitable for desktop and web service folks.

Who

Funding

Technical Notes

  • I think building on the existing FGS infrastructure Linux (and possibly other Unix platforms) is attractive.
  • I think the existing MS4W package could potentially be a base for windows distribution.
  • William Kyngesburye has done a great deal of work producing MacOS X framework-style packages of GDAL, MapServer, GRASS etc for MacOS X ( http://www.kyngchaos.com/ ).
  • GDF Hannover has build RPMs for various Linux distros: http://www.gdf-hannover.de/software This could be a starting point
  • Osaka City University has built RPMs for Mandriva Linux distros: http://wgrass.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/foss4g/downloads This could be a starting point too
  • Stephan Holl/GDF has written a GUI installer for QGIS0.8 with winGRASS-native integrated (MS-Windows).
  • DebianGIS is about improving Debian to make it the best distribution for Geographical Information Systems applications and users. A good deal of GIS related softwares and libraries (e.g. GRASS) are already present in Debian. We have currently an up-to-date GRASS package in main and many other packages.
  • UbuntuGIS is a wiki page that collects informations about all the GIS packages users find in a standard Ubuntu installation
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