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The current iteration (as available here), has an out of date version of Quantum GIS, doesn’t contain the statistical package R, and also contains a bunch of other stuff that we won’t use on the course (MySQL, GvSIG etc).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!

Part of my fabulous new plans for portable gis (which will be revealed soon-ish) involve including a database replication option. This might or might not work on the USB drive, but it needs to be open source, portable, and connect to postgresql at the very least. I have been looking at a couple of options for this, without a vast amount of success, it has to be said.

The packages that I have tried are: Daffodil Replicator, dbreplicator (a fork of daffodil replicator), Symmetric-DS, and db -connector for Funambol. Of these, daffodil and dbreplicator seem like the best bet as they will attempt to do some conflict resolution (eg when the same record is added/altered in both databases). They are also java-based, so should be nicely configurable. Symmetric-DS works well, but doesn’t do conflict resolution, so that kind of rules it out for me. I don’t really know about db-connector for funambol as the documentation that I found was quite out of date and I didn’t get very far with it.

So, daffodil replicator and dbreplicator…

They are quite easy to set up, although the documentation in both cases assumes rather more end-user knowledge than perhaps they should do. Basically you find an appropriate jdbc jar file for your database, grab log4j.jar from somewhere, and tell daffodilreplicator/dbreplicator where to find it, by setting appropriate paths in batch files. Then you start the publication server and set up the details for your “master” database, and then do the same for the subscription server and the “client” database. Both are clever enough to translate between different database types, such as postgresql and mysql, which in some cases would be really handy.

My difficulty with both flavours of the package came when creating the “subscription”, ie telling the client database where to go find the master database. In neither case have I been able to sucessfully set this up, because of various errors. Weirdly, both flavours of the package give me an error in my log file about the first ever subscription that I tried to set up, despite having reinstalled, deleted everything I could find, and started from scratch several times.

The documentation in both cases hasn’t been good enough to resolve my issues, and neither have the forums. Actually, I’m still waiting on dbreplicator, which seems to be a little more active, so I should give them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of days.

I can see a great need for this kind of setup, assuming I can get around these initial teething troubles. So, my question is, has anyone successfully set up any of these packages on windows (sorry, but it needs to be windows at this stage), or does anyone know of any other packages I should try?

If I do manage to get things sorted I’ll post a detailed how-to…

Due to popular request (well, two people at least have asked) I have created a google group for Portable GIS, for support, enhancement requests, and other such things. At the moment you need to request an invitation to join, as I don’t fancy having to deal with even larger mountains of spam.

You can find it here: http://groups.google.com/group/portable-gis

Enjoy!

Someone (thanks Bruce) has alerted me to a mistake in Portable GIS, which luckily requires a very minor patch- so minor that I am not going to release a new version now and force everyone to download it again, although it will be fixed in the next version. Basically there is a line in the apache config that doesn’t update it’s drive letter because the slashes are the wrong way around.

To fix:

Go into .\usbgis\apps\xampplite\apache\conf\httpd.conf with a text editor and find the line (should be right at the end of the file):

SetEnv PROJ_LIB N:\usbgis\apps\FWTools2.1.0\proj_lib

Where you might have a slightly different drive letter. To fix, change the directions of the slashes in the file path from \ to / and change the drive letter to whatever your current drive letter is, and save the file. Then when you change the drive letter in future and run the xampp setup, it should automatically update.

Thanks for your patience, thanks again to Bruce for pointing it out, and thanks to everyone for downloading it!

I was contacted by someone who has downloaded portable GIS, very sensibly asking for information on the postgresql connection details. When I tried to respond to this person, their email address bounced back with a permanent failure, so I thought I’d better write something here so he doesn’t think I’m not replying!

Now, I was sure that I had included a readme file specific to the postgresql installation, but it looks like the pixies might have eaten it. Anyhow: the very secret local username and password for postgresql on the USB stick are: postgres and grespost. Please take the opportunity to create your own username and password if you are concerned about security. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The next version (in a couple of months) will have better documentation- I promise. The trouble is that as every developer knows, creating documentation is the longest part of any project. If I had waited until I had some decent documentation I wouldn’t have released it at all, and believe me I’m glad I did, the reponse has been fabulous. I won’t, however, be including  documentation about how to use the programmes, as the majority of them already have pretty good user manuals online- I will include links to them though. You can hold me to that if you like!

Update: Due to issues with our download server, portable gis is not currently available. Investigations are taking place as to the exact cause and I will announce when it is fixed, though this may take a few days as I am away over the weekend. Thanks for your patience and your interest!

Version 1.2 of Portable GIS has been released today, addressing a number of bugs in Version 1.1. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and spotted the bugs. If you use, or intend to use, the web-based components of Portable GIS, or the OpenEV viewer, then this is a recommended update.

The download is available here, along with a patch to convert version 1.1 to 1.2. Please read the instructions provided in the patch file as the process is slightly complicated.

Feedback is, as ever, greatly appreciated, and thanks to the 100 or so people who have downloaded the first version!

Well, I guess I shouldn’t really put it off any further…

The very first release of Portable GIS is now available for download here. Phew! While you don’t have to register to download, it would be nice if you did, so I know who is interested and can contact about updates. No spam, I promise.

For people that don’t read the readme: this is not cross-platform, it’s for windows only. Unzip it and move the folders inside to the root of a USB stick, then double-click on the menu exe to access the programmes.

Edit: don’t forget to run the setup programmes for those that need it to change to the correct drive letter.

Note the big disclaimer: Be nice- it’s working as far as I can tell, but there might be issues and I’ll try and address them as soon as possible but this isn’t my full-time job.

Note also that very soon I’ll be moving the hosting and maintenance of this to somewhere else, which is why there are different email addresses in the package. Use those, or contact me here, it’s fine…