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Portable GIS on USB Keys

posted by Satri on Monday February 27, @11:55AM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the portable-professional-life dept.

Spatially Adjusted has a small blog entry about running GIS software directly from USB keys. From the entry: "Now that USB flash memory drives are so large and so cheap, we can start running programs off of them. [...] Anytime you need GIS, you’ll only have to whip out your memory stick and plug it in."

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Portable GIS on USB Keys Redux [+]

Previously discussed, the CGAUK blog provide information on GIS software on portable USB keys. From the entry: "I’m probably the last person to realise it’s possible to do this, but I was really pleased to see that both GRASS and PostgreSQL can now be run from a USB stick, along with QGIS, XAMPP (inc Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache), and FWTools. Before I go any further, I should state that my aims for creating a portable GIS are not so much having a production GIS setup on a stick, because obviously performance and storage are an issue, but it might be useful for demonstration purposes, and I do feel as if the take up of these opensource tools might be more if they were easier to install and came in one handy package."

GIS on sticks [+]

Lots of talk about Jo Cook's FOSS4G talk about portable GIS. Spatially Adjusted had a post a few days ago that links to a dedicated page on portable GIS on archaeogeek.. This has lots of implications for projects in developing countries, where computing infrastructure is an issue. Dr Barry Rowlingson's talk at FOSS4G, on Arlat (QGIS for visualzation and mapping integrated with R for spatial stats, using python) is the type of project that could benefit from being portable.

• back in the real world...

  (Score:3, Insightful)

  by briancnorton (255) on Monday February 27, @05:36PM (#465)

  This is pretty cool, but it's got a few substantial problems from a practical implementation standpoint.

  First, windows requires most programs to be installed to the system registry. I don't know about Qgis specifically, but this certainly woudn't fly with most programs. This is especially problematic with software that needs hardware dongles. (like most GIS software) The system relies on a protected path through the OS to the dongle.
  Second, you can certainly fit a lot of data on them, (I've never seen a 40gb like they have pictured) but file i/o is your big limitation. Even the fastest flash drives run no faster than about 60-80mbps. Seems fast except that you are now talking about gigabytes of data transfer for the swap files and system i/o. Hope you don't want to add too many rasters...

  • Re:back in the real world...

    (Score:4, Informative)

    by James Fee (106) on Monday February 27, @07:15PM (#469)
    ( http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/ )

    QGIS does not write to the registry and it doesn't really install itself (other can copy itself to C:\Program Files) so its the perfect program to run from a Flash USB Drive which is why I wrote the post in the first place.
    
    The drive pictured is 4.0 GB not 40 (though I wish it was) and with USB 2.0 I've had not problems running QGIS. Of course yes it would be preferable to run it off the hard drive, but sometimes you don't have permission to do so. What is nice about QGIS is that even if you don't have a super fast USB 2.0 connection, you can always just copy the folder off on to the hard drive and run it from there as it doesn't require admin rights to do so.
    
    I think you somewhat missed the point to why you'd want to do this. It is for emergency reasons only, not for every day use. I've used it when no other solutions were available to get quick and dirty work done. I wouldn't anticipate using rasters on a USB drive, but you can always copy them off to the local drive if it is really important.

    --
    Later, James

    [ Parent ]
    • Re:back in the real world...

      (Score:3, Interesting)

      by redgeographics (145) <{hans} {at} {redgeographics.com}> on Tuesday February 28, @05:17AM (#470)
      ( http://www.redgeographics.com/ )

      If disk space is an issue, you could consider going one step up to a portable hard drive. I seriously considered getting one yesterday. An 80 Gb model, powered through a USB 2.0 interface and specifically designed for on-the-road use. Probabely not the fastest drive around, but at 119 euro's (ex. VAT) certainly an interesting option. Main reason I was looking into it was because my laptop isn't exactly well endowed with disk-space (80 Gb in total) but I do run some heavy stuff on it while out of the office, so I need a lot free for temp space. Having an external drive for storage would be nice.

      --
      Hans van der Maarel

      [ Parent ]
  • Re:back in the real world...

    (Score:3)

    by Satri (3) on Tuesday February 28, @10:08AM (#471)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )

    First, windows requires most programs to be installed to the system registry.
    
    For those using MacOS X, you can directly boot any mac (example when at a client's office) with an external firewire hard drive. So you can get GRASS GIS or any other GIS to work as if you were at home or at your office and have a huge and relatively fast access to disk space. And yes, you can also boot your mac with firewire iPods. However, I heard the new mactels doesn't support external booting, but that remains to be confirmed.

    [ Parent ]
  • Re:back in the real world...

    (Score:3, Interesting)

    by belg4mit (226) on Tuesday February 28, @10:48AM (#473)
    ( http://pthbb.org/ )

    No, Windows does not require anything. Poorly written software instead relies upon writing to the registry. This may be encouraged by MS but it's not required. If I recall correctly you can do this with MapWindow, and probably ForestGIS too, and of course--as others have mentioned--the UNIX derived GRASS (although a full cygwin install will add a little bloat and a considerable performance penalty).

    --
    In Bob we trust, all others bring data.

    [ Parent ]