I had the privilege of giving a talk at LinuxFest Northwest this year… and what a cool event this is. We had a great room full of people interested in Geospatial technology, some great questions and I think some genuine interest from participants that could lead to some folks going home and hacking away with some mapping. Great job to the organizers of the event and looking forward to helping make LinuxFestNW 2009 an even bigger and better event!

Here are the links to my talk:

(PDF 4.5M) - (ODP 8M) - (PPT 8M)

(UPDATE 042808): They have now posted a link to the video of my talk:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/377931

(CUGOS) - For those local to the Pacific Northwest, come visit us and make some local Geospatial friends!!

As I noted over on the QGIS blog I have started to organize my python plugins and will be adding more soon.

4.5 gigs used for the base Ubuntu system as well as the base GIS software:

1) Proj4 (4.6.0)
2) GDAL/OGR (1.5.0)
3) GEOS (3.0.0)
4) Postgresql (8.2.5)
5) PostGIS (1.3.2)
6) QT dev environment (4.3.2)
7) QGIS svn (0.9.2)

What do you get? Well, an ultra portable GIS workstation weighing in at less than 2 lbs that is very fun!

Check out a video:

http://www.reprojected.com/presentations/Videos/eee_qgis_install/eee_qgis_install.html

$399 for the pc, $19 for 1 gig RAM upgrade, $21 for a 4 gig SDHC card and there you have a pretty fun machine.

Here are some pics…

New RAM going in…

!

QGIS running from a remote server!

Size compare with an IPOD…

Well, as I start to install more stuff I will post more info.  So far I am very happy and excited to be playing with the eee

1) Make sure you have Python 2.5 or newer installed on your machine… if you don’t have it you can download it from HERE (official) or HERE (my archive).

2) Install PyQt4.3.1 from HERE (official) or HERE (my archive)

3) Download and unpack THIS zip file. Copy the PyQt4 directory unpacked from the zip into your Python 2.5 site-packages directory. Make sure to save the old PyQt4 directory in the site-packages by renaming it in case something goes wrong!

4) Download and install QGIS from HERE (my archive). This is the latest release candidate from what_nick that is based on the Qt4.3.1 series.

5) In the QGIS install there are some GRASS documentation files that are missing and can cause warning dialogs to pop up when using the GRASS toolbox. You can unzip the contents of THIS archive into the QGISDIR\grass\docs\html directory to stop the warnings.

You can still follow the instructions HERE to build QGIS yourself and play to your hearts content, but I know that there are many windows users out there that really would just like to get moving without the hassle of compiling. This post is for you.

Well, it was a great week in Victoria BC for this years FOSS4G conference! Besides the great chance to hang out with the OS GIS community, it was a great chance to take a look at what is hot in our field. Keep checking back to the FOSS4G web site as many of the presentations as well as video from the plenaries are being uploaded.

My talk on the use of PyQGIS (Python bindings to QGIS) for development of some stand alone desktop tools went well. My powerpoints are here (6 meg). I even have a couple of snapshots of giving the talk (thanks to Gary Sherman).

Gary Sherman gave a great workshop on Monday. He has posted the slides and ISO image of the live CD on the QGIS blog. Here are a couple images that show Gary laying it out and some of the students soaking it in. I also had a voice recorder and have made streaming mp3’s of the session available at the following links:

Clip #1 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #2 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #3 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #4 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #5 (streaming or mp3)

Clip #6 (streaming or mp3)

We also had a great QGIS BOF session which was well attended by a diverse group of developers, users, and interested newbies. All in all I think QGIS had a great showing at FOSS4G and am looking forward to pushing many of the ideas talked about there forward.

Looks like someone from Redlands is drinking afternoon coffee while watching some vids!

Well, you can now watch me fumble around installing a new Ubuntu system and getting it all ready for development using much of the Open Source GIS stack, including QGIS, PostGIS, GDAL/OGR and many others…

Of particular interest:

1) Demo of installing new 0.9 branch of QGIS on Ubuntu Linux

2) Demo of using Python bindings for QGIS

I have a habit of installing from source, and most of the demos I am producing are walking through the install process doing just that… beware!

Enjoy, and I would be interested if there are things in the Open Source stack that people are interested in seeing a demo of…

NOTE: you can link to the video page from the right pane of the blog window under GIS How-To’s -> Video

Just returned from a week on the road and one of the highlights was GIS in Action, the Oregon and Southwest Washington URISA annual GIS event. There were over 300 people on site for 2 days of great talks, workshops and panels. I was asked again to host one of the Open Source sessions at the conference and we participated on Wednesday. I presented on the OSGeo, some sample applications of the Open Source GIS technology, and even had a quick online IRC chat with Chris Schmidt of Openlayers in front of the crowd. We also had Dean Anderson from Polk County talking about doing open development when confined to a proprietary environment (often the case in government). He had some great examples of developing Arc based software on SourceForge. Finally we had Deborah Bryant from the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSU OSL) to talk about government uptake of Open Source technology. She provides great insight to the front lines of getting Open Source accepted in main stream government. She runs the GOSCON conference and is a wealth of knowledge on the current state of Open Source in government, big and small.

All of the presentations from our Open Source session are posted in my presentation archive…