[Live-demo] Mass production of OSGeo Live USB - any SMEs providing this ?

[James Klassen]

Not sure if it is useful to others but I wrote a program [1] to help me
when Bob wants a bunch of OSGeo-Live thumb drives created.  It isn't by any
means perfect or 100% foolproof but it sure makes the job quicker for me.

It takes an image and waits for USBs of the same size to be inserted, then
copys the difference between the image and the drive (this is quicker as
reads are much faster than writes on the thumb drives I have seen).  It
handles multiple thumb drives at a time, so after starting it, it is just
down to changing out drives for new ones as they finish copying.

I make the image running OSGeo Live in KVM and let it build a virtual USB
at the size of the drives I have on hand.  It can help to have the image on
a tmpfs to avoid the source being a bottleneck.

[1] https://github.com/klassenjs/copy_usb


On Apr 18, 2017 9:45 AM, "Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul)" <
bob.basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us> wrote:

> Bas,
>
> We’ve been making Thumb drives for a few years now and DVDs before that.
> We’ve been making the Thumb Drives by hand on our own, which is a bit of
> time and effort to complete.  We’ve been handling this for our own
> promotional purposes of OSGeo, etc and have only been building less than 75
> at a time.
>
> We’ve also installed some of the OSGeo-Live apps on a Raspberry Pi to good
> effect, but we haven’t tried a whole Live install on a PI yet, but all
> indications are that it would (mostly) work.  The Short answer is, we’ve
> figure out the mechanics of this, but the writing of the actual hardware
> would require some funding to complete as a repeatable process.
>
> bobb
>
>
>
> On Apr 18, 2017, at 9:19 AM, Bas Couwenberg <sebastic at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> On 2017-04-18 15:55, Basques, Bob (CI-StPaul) wrote:
>
> Just to add to the mix, and stir the pot somewhat, an idea to consider
> on this . . . what about . . .
> having some sort of support stack/infrastructure in place for
> providing the OSGeo-Live as a bunch of different devices and
> (portable) services.  For example,
>  *   Generating the Thumb Drives
>     *   These should be generated as needed, based on our usage
> locally for different events.  When we don’t end up using some of them
> at a particular event, we end up re-writing them with the newer
> version of OSGeo-Live for the next event.  Not really an economically
> sound model.
>  *   Setting up something like a Raspberry Pi with OSGeo-Live.
> Possibly for resale, certainly as a download for other to install.
>  *   Setting up a Cloud (OSGE Certified?!) version of OSGe-Live
>  *   As has been mentioned before, an application picker for
> installation of software would go a long ways.
>     *   There’s a bit of effort required for this one I’ll grant you,
> but it would certainly go along was toward promoting OSGeo.
>  *   Cloud service(s) version of OSGeo.
>  *   Setting up a Docker . . .
> Well you get the idea,  if your going to pay for something, may as
> well go for broke.  You end up with a one stop shop and possibly a
> container of sorts for other projects to add in their own dedicated
> versions of the same sort of devices/services.
>
>
> Are you volunteering to implement any of the above?
>
> These are good suggestions, but without people to do the work it will
> never materialize.
>
> OSGeo-Live is understaffed as it is, see also:
>
> http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/live-demo/2017-April/012031.html
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Bas
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