[OSGeo-Discuss] New to the list & A question

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

Welcome Andy,

Between many of us, we are familiar with all the technologies you  
mention, so you've come to right place.  Although the MapServer users  
mailing list may be able to help more specifically on MapServer  
questions.

Just a few quick notes for you before someone with real experience  
addressing your problems writes.
* You should be able to add support for ArcSDE datasets into GDAL/OGR  
for accessing the data in MapServer.  But you may find you have to  
recompile GDAL/OGR from scratch or in some cases add in a module.   
I'm not 100% on the process here as I haven't done it exactly.
* ECW support is handled in a similar way to the above.  I suggest  
you search the GDAL/OGR (http://gdal.org) mailing list archives or  
the ECW page on the OGR data formats web page.  It might be as simple  
as dropping in a .so file somewhere.
* The best alternatives to ArcSDE is likely to be PostgreSQL database  
with the PostGIS spatial extension.
* For ECW alternatives it's not a simple move as the two main  
compression technologies are proprietary - the main other being  
Lizardtech's MrSID format.  You might find you can still use ECW or  
MrSID depending on your specific needs.  Otherwise you could move to  
the open JPEG2000 format that still provides good compression, though  
from my own experience it seems to have a higher overhead for  
decompressing the data (it's likely improved since my last time using  
it).

Hope that helps.  Like I said, others here are experts on particular  
components so they will likely pop up with real solutions rather than  
my hot air ;-)

Best wishes,
Tyler

On 6-May-09, at 7:15 AM, Andy Kannberg wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> I am new to the list, and I have subscribed for the following reason:
> I am a linux/unix consultant, currently deployed at a government. At
> this government they use a GIS system, based on Mapserver. Additional
> software is also used, like GDAL, GEOS, ECW, ArcSDE SDK, Xerces-c,
> Oracle Instant client, GD, Proj, Fcgi and Postgis.
> All is running on a RHEL4 system. The idea is to run this all on
> Ubuntu 8.04. I've found all packages to be available on Ubuntu, except
> for ArgSDE SDK (Now a part of ArcGIS Server) and ECW, which is from
> Erdas. ArcGIS server is propietary, and is only supported on RedHat or
> Suse.
> ECW is a SDK from Erdas (www.ermapper.com), and, apparantly they've
> changed their EULA and it says, it is now allowed to use the ECW SDK
> within Mapserver. (This is second hand info, so please don't shoot me
> if it is not correct.)
>
> So, my actual question is, is there an alternative to ArcGIS and ECW ?
> Would appreciate it if someone can shed a light on this, as GIS
> systems are new to me.
>
> cheers,
>
> Andy Kannberg