[GRASS-user] grass live CD for education

[Michael Barton]

This is an extraordinarily timely request. Linux is a great OS, and a live
CD can make it available to Windows users without installing it. However, if
people are not interested in committing to installing Linux on their own
machine, then training on software that runs only on this OS doesn't help
much. I've taught with GRASS under Cygwin. It was possible, but a real pain
in a lab setting. But now you have a very nice alternative.

I'm copying below a notice that went out to the GRASS developers list within
the past hour. If you want, you CAN get an easy to install Windows version
of GRASS without Cygwin. One of my grad students tried out a version of a
couple weeks ago and reported it to be very nice and fast...and easy to
install. It is simply a zip file. The only thing that you might need to
install extra is a program called Mysys. I think that this is covered in the
readme.

I'm copying the binary maintainer, Moritz Lennert, in case he has something
else to add.

Michael

------ Forwarded Message
> From: Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be>
> Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 16:18:48 +0200
> To: <wingrass at grass.itc.it>, Grass Developers List <grass-dev at grass.itc.it>,
> GRASS users list <grassuser at grass.itc.it>
> Subject: [GRASS-user] native winGRASS pre-alpha testers needed
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have updated the GRASS native win package at
> 
> http://moritz.homelinux.org/grass/wingrass/
> 
> (see instructions in the README file)
> 
> We definitely need testers if we want to speed up development on this. I
> don't have much time to spend on testing at the moment. Even though you
> can use a variety of modules in winGRASS, we are still far from a really
> usable port. Only testing (and fixing ;-) ) will get us there.
> 
> Moritz
> 
> 



On 5/18/07 9:05 AM, "wouter.buytaert at scarlet.be"
<wouter.buytaert at scarlet.be> wrote:

> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I am giving GRASS (and open source GIS) workshops every now and then. The
> next one is in a few weeks. The problem is, I have only windows machines
> available, and I have had bad experiences with badly installed CYGWIN and
> GRASS versions in the past. (I have to leave it to the sysadmins).
> 
> I have proposed to use linux liveCD's but I am not allowed to use them due
> to security reasons (access to the HD and network).
> 
> Theoretically it does not seem to be too difficult to disable those
> functions on a liveCD. Although I am an experienced linux user, I have no
> experience with liveCD's. So before I spend a lot of time trying, I would
> like the opinion of the mailing list.
> Specifically:
> 
> - anyone with experience making linux live CD's including grass?
> 
> - if so, which distribution to start with (knoppix seems a logical choice
> and has a good customisation manual)
> 
> - any hidden snakes under the grass that anyone knows of?
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Wouter
> 
> 

__________________________________________
Michael Barton, Professor of Anthropology
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity
Arizona State University

phone: 480-965-6213
fax: 480-965-7671
www: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton