[Live-demo] Teaching Spatial Programming - Raspberry Pi

[Cameron Shorter]

Hello all,
I've been asked whether OSGeo-Live would run on Raspberry Pi, to be used 
as a teaching device a.
Raspberry Pi is a $25 credit card size computer. It runs Debian and only 
has 256 Meg of RAM. http://www.raspberrypi.org

I've CCed the OSGeo-Live email list, as I expect there will be many on 
the list with an interest, and probably a few opinions too.

The challenge will be the size of RAM. Up to version 5.0, we ran 
OSGeo-Live with 512 Meg of RAM, but with version 5.5 we discovered that 
some of the Java applications required more RAM, and we recommend at 
least 768 Meg RAM, and preferably 1 Gig.
The problem will be all the java based applications, which are RAM 
intensive.

You could potentially run OSGeo-Live, without invoking the java based 
applications and there are a C based applications for most, if not all 
the tasks you would likely to be teaching.
You could test this be running OSGeo-Live in a Virtual Machine, and 
limiting the size of the RAM in the Virtual Machine to 256 Meg of RAM.
You can see approximate RAM usage, and core language for many of our 
applications in the following spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al9zh8DjmU_RdGIzd0VLLTBpQVJuNVlHMlBWSDhKLXc#gid=13

OSGeo-Live is based upon Xubuntu (which is a small version of Ubuntu), 
and I note from the faq that Ubuntu is not supported by Ubuntu. That 
might be a problem.
What you may need to do is start with a Debian Squeeze distribution, 
then execute the OSGeo-Live build process, probably with a few tweaks, 
to build a custom OSGeo-Live. In this process, you might also only 
select applications which will run within the 256 Meg limit.








-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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