…just finished new assembly of MapSnack 0.5,
few facts:
- based on Debian Etch
- runs on VMWare
- uses MapServer
- can be ‘livelized’ with one command in 5-10 minutes (thus run natively from DVD)
- can be run partly from DVD (with VMWare snapshot feature)
quoting from http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2006/11/changing_role_o.html
“Once you have a pervasive virtualization layer that focuses exclusively on managing all the underlying hardware and can run any OS, developers will finally be able to adapt and integrate the operating system as a part of their application, ship both of those together as a virtual machine and be confident it can run in any environment.”
Recently I was interested in caching WMS requests on MapSnack, that would allow off-line usage of WMS sources. Unfortunately there is no functional WMS discovery or search engine. Google is very weak in this area and even inurl: doesn’t bring too many results. There is one paper I found on this topics called “OpenGIS WMS-based prototype system of Spatial Information Search Engine” but to access this paper you nee to login to IEEE. pages. So how to help google to index WMS layers and pictures it produce ? one of the thoughts I have is to create simple set of pages on which each request for certain layer for certain zoom level and in particular tile would be referenced. Tiling is important as “sampling frequency” for the WMS cache. Actually last year I was working on prototype which enabled me to save for offline use WMS tiled layers (refer to http://www.sumbera.com/news/mapajax/mapajax.htm) what was missing was an automatic crawler on the area and layers – the saving was done only by manual navigation in the area. Last note : I expect the shift of the google search engine towards this freely available geospatail content (…. just right after I will start to generate my index pages ;)
MapSnack runs.
thanks to Jachym Cepicky and Peter Balogh we have now 2 pilot runs of MapSnack
1st: http://mapserver-slp.mendelu.cz – serving school forest enterprise maps SLP Krtiny
2nd : http://mapsnack.mendelu.cz – serving maps of southmoravia area
all 2 virtual geospatial appliances runs on server MapBistro with VMware Server installed on Debian
The only thing which is missing there is a button for downloading MapSnack.
So kind of Web WYSIWYG :))
Today I’ve tried to access virtual disks from DVD to run MapSnack. Interestingly enough it runs, the trick is to make snapshot which can be read-only and remain on DVD – so you don’t need to copy all Gigabytes to your hardrive. Instead you copy on your HD just few MB of ‘delta’ virtual disks which need to be writable. Of course it is slower to read from DVD but for saving a disk space that make sense. So let’s consider following modes of running MapSnack: 1. virtualized and runing from harddrive (current release) 2. virtualized but mostly run directly from DVD (this) 3. native run from DVD as LiveDVD (see previous post) 4. hybrid run – native: small booting iso image which mounts virtual disks virtual: see point 2. Number 4 is target which brings great flexibility.
MapSnack has been already 165 times downloaded from June 2006 via bittorrent,
that is in average more than 1 downloads per day since June 2006 !
few more downloads and we reach 100 Gigabytes sent.
MapSnack presentation at slideshare.com : view here
I am excited to announce born of MapSnack. I and my colleague Jachym have created experimental Live Linux CD with GIS capability called ‘MapSnack’..your fast food for GIS. Interesting fact is that it can be run directly on HW or as virtual machine from VMware. The reason to do it was to give data consumers not only processed data but also basic functionality to view, analyse and publish them. Moreover installation time is either zero (in case of live runing) or just copy ISO file to your computer to run it from VMware. But may be it is crazy … you go for a shoping and buy an ice cream and you get fridge for free…:))
download iso [669 MB] - you can burn ISO on CD and run as Live Linux
download VMX config [1 KB] to run ISO file as virtual machine
If you don’t have VMware Workstation, go to VMware player to download free virtual machine player either for Windows or for Linux so you can enjoy running LiveCD on top of your host OS.
Details to run MapSnack in VMware Player: Download both files (ISO + VMX) into the same folder – named for example MapSnack. When you double click on VMX file you will get VMware player running and asking you to create new identifier…just confirm. Then MapSnack enters full screen mode…to get out back to your host OS pres Ctrl+alt. 
