Announce: MapSnack - Geospatial Virtual Appliance

[Stanislav Sumbera]

[cross posting to freegis]
Hi all,

I have presented at FOSS4G idea, way and solution to what I started to 
call as "Geospatial Virtual Appliance" Actually its name is MapSnack, 
it runs as virtual machine - completly isolated from underlying host 
machine, alowing you to make snapshots, extend, safely drop or return 
back state..simply all benefits offered by virtualization.
I belive this could be a way of complimentary offering to binary 
distros to wide range of users who just don't want to install and 
interfere with their existing system - just copy files to your hdd and 
run via.

Currently MapSnack supports VMWare virtualization platform (thus you 
need free VMWare player running either on Linux or Windows and soon on 
Mac). I plan to support various virtualization platforms (Xen, 
QEMU,..)and native run as well and create various appliances targeting 
specific user needs rather than putting there all possible packages.

I feel that the term "GEOSPATIAL VIRTUAL APPLIANCE" is very important 
and need to be addressed to the users who are just unconsciously 
waiting for this option to start leverage SaaS approach without any 
risk.

Main information you can find here:
http://www.foss4g2006.org/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=84&sessionId=41&confId=1


home page of the project is: http://mapsnack.mendelu.cz
download can be done via bittorent from: 
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/187

Kay Applications perinstalled: Apache-2.2.2 PHP-5.1.4 GDAL-1.3.1 
PROJ-4.4.9 GRASS-6.0.2 MapServer-4.8.3 MapLab-2.2.1 ka-map-0.2.0 
p.mapper-1.9.5 beta



if you have any questions please contact me...

..enjoy    ..your (map)Snack


Stan