Portable GIS kit

[Chris McDowall]

Kia ora koutou,

I wanted to let everyone know about some good work that Jo Cook has
been doing in the UK. Jo is an archaeologist/spatial informatics
person who has put together a portable package of free GIS software
that runs off a USB stick.

I have been using the package for a short time. It is useful to be
able to meet with a client in their office and have access to a full-
featured GIS suite at a moment's notice.

http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/portable-gis/

In Jo's own words:

"The philosophy behind this idea was to provide beginners with a ready-
installed and configured stack of open source GIS tools that would run
in windows without the need for emulation or a live cd. By taking out
the often difficult installation and configuration, I hope to make it
easier for beginners to get started with open source GIS, so they are
not put off before it gets interesting and fun. Not only that, but
having a fully self-contained GIS system may prove useful in a number
of real-life situations."

* Desktop GIS packages GRASS (windows native version 6.3: does not
need cygwin), QGIS (version 0.10 with GRASS plugin) and gvSIG (version
1.1),
* FWTools (GDAL and OGR toolkit, version 2.10)
* XAMPPlite (Apache2/MySQL5/Php5),
* PostgreSQL (version 8.2)/Postgis (version 1.1),
* Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache, Featureserver, and Geoserver
web applications.

[Huia]

Hi Chris
haven't had luck downloading the software yet (pretty slow connection
where I'm at). Can you expand on some of the tools available in the
software? e.g. what's the basic tools you get to play with - search,
view, print, edit etc? Is it a workable package for those starting
out?
cheers
Huia

[Chris McDowall]

Good question, Huia. The whole package is probably a bit overwhelming
for a beginner. Most of the stuff in there that is geared up for
people to provide geo- webservices.

There is one component that is very useful for people starting out -
Quantum GIS. Quantum GIS is a mature open-source desktop GIS package
that has a friendly interface and enables folks to view, edit, query
and analyse geo-spatial data. People have written all sorts of plugins
that expand it's capabilities.

Here's the project page.
http://www.qgis.org/
You can download a copy of Quantum GIS here.
http://qgis.org/en/download/binaries.html

If people are interested in getting a portable version of just Quantum
GIS (one that you can put on a USB drive, for example), I have
isolated the software from the rest of the Jo Cook's package. If
someone can suggest a host I can make the 125MB *.zip file available.

Cheers,
chris

[Duane Wilkins]

I'll second Chris on the quantum GIS, even used it today, its a great little freeware app, we use it to distribute a view + data to colleagues working on projects, like engineers who just want something a little more gutzy than ArcExplorer or ArcReader. 

Grass is a little tricky to get started with, but if you want to manipulate Landsat Rasters, its pretty good freeware for that, worth a couple hours investment sometime. The webserver that comes with it is pretty good also and am looking at implementing that to the WWW.

If you have trouble downloading, try installing Flashget download manager - worked for me over a satellite connection, but took about 2 days. It has a great little built in menu that sits in your windows tray, and its about 1.2gb extracted, so you need a minimum 2gb USB stick which Dick Smith will have for about $25.  

Cheers

Duane,

________________________

GIS Manager | USAID HRLS II

Afghan Infrastructure Data Centre

Kabul , Kandahar, Hemand, Hirat, Afghanistan

+93 700 219 622

duane....@gmail.com 

2009/8/26 Chris McDowall <chris.m...@gmail.com>