[OSGeoLive] Will there be an ARM version of the osgeo live?

Brian M Hamlin maplabs at light42.com
Fri Feb 11 14:27:50 PST 2022


Hi All -

   I had a very brief exchange with the Director [0] of the Oregon State 
University Open Source Labs today (where OSGeo servers are located, 
among many others). The topic of remote VMs was mentioned,

   Q. What is the difference between a "cloud image" and install media ?

   A. something like this: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/focal/current/

     for us i'd be ideal to have an qcow2 image that has cloud-init 
installed/configured and kvm working as guest


[0] https://osuosl.org/about/people/     Lance Albertson

    best regards from Berkeley, Calif    --Brian M Hamlin    / MAPLABS  /


On 2/7/22 11:19 AM, Brian M Hamlin wrote:
>
> Hi Cameron -
>
>   thank you for bringing this up -- I have written extensively in IRC 
> chat on this topic at least twice since 2009. The technical details 
> are not that difficult, but not easy to list exhaustively without some 
> effort. More from a marketing and user-advocate point of view, I think 
> that it can be summed up very well, as follows:
>
>   the osgeolive QGis stack, all the plugins and associated services, 
> connected in a functional way, can be thought of as a graph.
>
>   similarly, all the web-facing services, all the plugins and 
> associated services, connected with their dependancies in terms of the 
> dot-deb or installer script that installs them, can also be thought of 
> as a graph
>
>   the difference between those two graphs.. what is ONLY in one graph 
> versus what is ONLY in the other graph, are in fact, a very decent 
> first aproximation of the difference between the osgeolive that we 
> ship now, versus what a "cloud" osgeolive would be
>
>   I believe Angelos knows this very well, and I welcome input or 
> repudiation, from any community member
>
>   thank you and best regards from Berkeley, Calif    --Brian M 
> Hamlin    /  MAPLABS  /
>
>
> On 2/7/22 10:43 AM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> Something which is getting more-and-more feasible every year is to 
>> run OSGeo-Live as a virtual machine in the cloud.
>> We actually managed to do this back in 2009 
>> <http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2009/10/try-open-source-geospatial-desktop.html>, 
>> but the partners working on it got stuck in the following release.
>> Someone might want to take another look at this approach?
>>
>> On Tue, 8 Feb 2022 at 01:47, James Klassen <jklassen at sharedgeo.org 
>> <mailto:jklassen at sharedgeo.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     There was discussion awhile back about supporting ARM for
>>     Raspberry Pi and similar SBCs that came to the same conclusion
>>     that it would take more developer resources that were available.
>>
>>     OSGeo Live is meant to “just work” to encourage new users explore
>>     the software without having to first face the learning curve of
>>     getting it installed and configured correctly.  That is a lot
>>     more difficult to accomplish when users face to face the
>>     variations inherent in running different architectures.
>>
>>     Most, but not all of the packages that go into OSGeo Live are
>>     available on ARM (are in Ubuntu-GIS and Debian-GIS or are
>>     platform agnostic and install the same files as on x86).  So,
>>     technically it isn’t too far fetched.  But, if I remember
>>     correctly, pain points are testing and documentation.  I’d
>>     venture a guess that, by far, nearly all of the developer time on
>>     OSGeo Live is spent on testing and documentation.
>>
>>     Another issue with ARM is that while the user space is the
>>     same/similar across ARM devices, a bootable image (like we do
>>     with x86) would have to be tailored to each device.  Maybe there
>>     would be a way to just provide a user space and have the user
>>     provide the matching version of Ubuntu for their machine. Maybe
>>     the whole thing could be built into a snap or flatpak or
>>     appimage.  It would still be a different experience than we’ve
>>     traditionally had for x86 which raises documentation and ease of
>>     use concerns.
>>
>>
>>     I’m also a bit surprised the M1 Macs can’t run x86 OSes in
>>     emulation.  There were programs that emulated a PC to allow 68k
>>     and PowerPC  era Macs to run DOS/Windows.
>>
>>     On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 04:06 Angelos Tzotsos
>>     <gcpp.kalxas at gmail.com <mailto:gcpp.kalxas at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         Dear Barend,
>>
>>         We do not have an ARM version. This would require more developer
>>         resources than we currently have, so there is currently no
>>         plan to
>>         support this architecture.
>>
>>         Best,
>>         Angelos
>>
>>         On 2/2/22 01:24, Kobben, Barend (UT-ITC) wrote:
>>         > For installation in the Parallels virtual machine on a new
>>         MacPro (running on the Apple silicon architecture), an ARM
>>         version instead of an Intel version is needed. Is that
>>         available, or will in be...? Or are there alternative ways to
>>         get it running on a Mac M1...?
>>         >
>>         > --
>>         > Barend Köbben
>>         > Senior Lecturer – ITC-GIP & ATLAS, University Twente
>>         > PO Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede (The Netherlands)
>>         > +31-(0)53 4874 253 / room 1-065 ITC
>>         >
>>         > _______________________________________________
>>         > osgeolive mailing list
>>         > osgeolive at lists.osgeo.org <mailto:osgeolive at lists.osgeo.org>
>>         > https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/osgeolive
>>
>>
>>         -- 
>>         Angelos Tzotsos, PhD
>>         President
>>         Open Source Geospatial Foundation
>>         http://users.ntua.gr/tzotsos
>>
>>         _______________________________________________
>>         osgeolive mailing list
>>         osgeolive at lists.osgeo.org <mailto:osgeolive at lists.osgeo.org>
>>         https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/osgeolive
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Cameron Shorter
>> Technical Writer, Google
>>
>>
>>
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