Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I’m helping to teach at a workshop on open source GIS at the University of Leicester in a couple of week’s time. As usual, this means running around trying to get all the software that we need installed on the university computers. As usual, what the course organisers think will be OK, and what the IT department think will be OK, are two different things!

We’d rather not use a LiveDVD, as we want the students to work in the environment which they are used to- in this case windows. We don’t really want to saddle the IT department with lots of PostgreSQL and Apache configuration, so we’re going to try using Portable GIS (gulp).

The current iteration (as available here), has an out of date version of Quantum GIS, doesn’t contain the statistical package R, and also contains a bunch of other stuff that we won’t use on the course (MySQL, GvSIG etc). The beauty of open source cross platform software though, is that rolling a customised version, containing just what software we need, and the latest versions, was quite easy.  Adding in the data, and even the course notes, will be straightforward (once we’ve written them, of course!). Installation is simply a case of copying everything onto each pc, and the students can take it all home with them when they are done.

The open source license is not the big deal here, despite the title of the post, but the added benefits that it brings are pretty cool. Free software means we can run the course without having to worry about buying licenses, or sending students home with limited demo versions afterwards. The cross-platform nature of the software means most of the donkey work is done in human readable files that can easily be edited to work in a portable fashion, and finally, because it’s open source, we can do that legally.

I think that’s all pretty cool…

(Small Plug) If you like the idea of using Portable GIS for a course, but don’t fancy customising or preparing it yourself, then get in touch!

Apologies to the couple of people who were kind enough to report portable GIS bugs on the launchpad site, only to have their bugs totally ignored.  I didn’t set things up properly, and wasn’t getting email notifications. I’ll deal with the issues and post a fix if I can, and now I am getting notifications, so if anyone else finds any issues do let me know. I also don’t know how I managed to lose my contact form, but it’s back now. Must have been pixies…

A quick post to give people a heads up that there seems to be a google groups problem affecting the portable-gis group, amongst others.

If you have signed up with a googlemail account (not gmail, or any other email account) then your messages may get bounced back with a permissions error.  This seems to be a general problem affecting many groups, so no doubt a fix is in progress, but just so you know, I’m not blocking anyone (hell, I can’t post to my own group at the moment!).

OK, I’m excited to announce that the new version of Portable GIS, complete with the latest versions (as of today- I have to draw the line somewhere) of all the software, is now in testing phase and pretty much ready to release. It’s a bit slicker that the previous version, and comes with some extra software and utilities.

Here is my problem: the last release weighed in at just less that 1GB downloaded, but the new one looks like coming in at approx 1.6GB though I’m going to zip it up in an exe which might help a bit. Software tends to increase in size from version to version, so some “bloat” is unavoidable, but is 1.6GB excessive?

I have a couple of options that I can take to reduce the size. The first is to strip out programmes, so that, for instance, there is only 1 desktop GIS package, or only 1 map server package. The second is to turn this setup into a Portable App, which gives me options to compress the files. I have previously been reluctant to go down the second route because I want the files in Portable GIS to be as similar to those in a standard download as possible, so that people can dig in and see what’s going on and use Portable GIS as a spring board to installing the apps themselves. I worry that “Portable-ising” the files will alter them in some way, but if someone can reassure me about that it’s something to consider.

So, questions:

1. Is 1.6GB excessive for a download of this type?
2. Should I only provide one desktop package and one map server?
3. Should I turn Portable GIS into a fully fledged portable app?

Thanks for your feedback!