[Ica-osgeo-labs] Ideas/inputs for having a cloud service that runs the OSGeo-Live VM

[Andy Anderson]

On Oct 14, 2015, at 12:58 PM, Peter Baumann <baumann at rasdaman.com> wrote:

> - the USB drive is getting too small for the stuff to be shown. And we cannot
> use bigger sticks as MacOS doesn't eat them (that's what I have been told).

If the sticks are formatted as Mac HFS+ drives, there should be no unreasonable limit. If they are formatted as NTFS, there should again be no unreasonable limit, but Macs can’t write to them. If they are instead formatted as FAT-32, they are limited to 4 GB, though Macs can again write to them.

> - I have experienced some people being hesitant to boot from a stick due to
> security concerns: "will it now transfer my harddisk contents into the Internet?"

Make sure you’ve double-checked your flash drive with a good malware scanner, as that is a reasonable fear.

> - at demos there is a zillion of different participant laptops around causing
> all sort of trouble. It is just convenient to point to a website instead.

And then you have issues with browser compatibility, etc.

Those on limited budgets often turn to open-source software. But this also generally means that have older equipment and operating systems. So I think there is a higher imperative for open-source software to maintain backward operating-system compatibility for as long as possible in current versions of the software. (It often seems to have a shorter lifetime than commercial products.)

— Andy