[GRASS-user] Tips for setting up an new FOSS-GEO-linux-box

[Patton, Eric]

>OS:
>OK, I think I shouldn't ask about which OS since foss runs on everything
>(right?). But are I am curious to know if there are any advantages using
>Debian instead of Ubuntu for example?

Everyone has their own favorite; I've been using Ubuntu and Grass together
since 2004, with no difficulties on 32-bit and 64-bit machines.

>Filesystems:
>Which filesystem is better(=safer/faster) for data storage? Is there any
>important advantage to choose XFS for example rather than ext3?

Not sure about the main differences/advantages of either; I've been using ext3
since forever, with no regrets.

>Partitions:
>Do you keep your geo-data in a separate partition? I suppose yes. Have
>you split further your partition based on other criteria, always related
>with "working with geospatial data"?

Pretty much the main 3-4 projects I'm working on are on /home, with anything I
haven't worked on in the last 2-weeks backed up and archived on an external 
2TB hardrive. (LaCie)

>Do you keep all of your source code in a separate partition maybe?

Nope, just under good old /usr/local. I only compile from scratch those applications where
I need all the bleeding edge goodies and bug fixes, which, for me, is only Grass,
gdal, and lilypond. I try to use the distribution's packages for everything else; 
makes it a lot easier to maintain using the package manager than chasing around 
and recompiling source for a ton of apps. 

>Organisation:
>GRASS takes care to organise the data inside the GIS data-base and its
>fantastic. But what about the "raw" data? How do you organise them?
>Manually everything? Any tool to be more productive?

Once raw data is imported into Grass, I usually get it off my hard drive and backed 
up onto something external, in case my computer melts down; then I can always
rebuild from scratch. Of course the external drive could also melt down. I guess
a RAID would be even better, but costs more.

>BackUp:
>How often do you backup your data? Do you just copy or do you compress
>as well? What is safer?

I've been using 'tar cjvf' for each project, but that is becoming unmanageable; I need 
to migrate to a versioning system as Dylan has done with rsync. At least for the
projects I work on all the time. The old stuff can probably stay on the backup drive
in tar.bz2 format.


>Other:
>Any other important issues when setting-up a new foss-geo-box?

I just installed Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 yesterday, and found it much easier
installing packages via Synaptic rather than downloading the bleeding edge
source packages and compiling. The only source package I had to compile was 
Grass.


Thank you, Nikos

P.S. Maybe we can add a new wiki-page if something useful comes out of
this thread. Or maybe not... :-)

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