[Qgis-user] What hardware for QGIS

[Lee Hachadoorian]

Hi Neil,

I'm not a Mac user, so these partial answers are based on running QGIS
on Ubuntu Linux and also running ArcGIS in a VM.

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 4:56 AM,  <neil2 at ansergis.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am just getting to know QGIS having taken a brief two day overview course
> at GISRUK 2012 and realised that it really is becoming a practical
> alternative to Arc.
> One of the many attractions of it is the possibility to also escape from
> windows.
>
> So I am looking at buying an Apple Mac and was hoping for some advice :
>
> a) What are the limits to the resources that QGIS can realistically use
> (i.e. in the same way that ArcMap is still pretty much stuck with single
> core 32bit processing so there isn't much point sticking 16Gig of memory in
> a machine running it).
>
> b) If I do go with Mac, am I better to install the Mac version of QGIS or
> run Linux also.

Installation on Linux is *probably* more straightforward. For
installing on Mac, one of my students found
http://www.kyngchaos.com/software/qgis helpful. The only reason I can
think of to run QGIS in Linux instead of Mac is if you expect to be
regularly working with other Linux software and don't want to keep
switching OSes. I would definitely try it on Mac first if that's your
preferred OS.

>
> c) As I am unlikely to entirely escape ESRI, has anyone experience of
> running ArcGIS on a windows simulator? (i.e. do I need to divide my
> resources between two machines).

ArcGIS runs fine in a VM. You may run into problems if you need to run
a version like ArcInfo that requires a hardware dongle for
authentication. I've only been using a version requiring an
alphanumeric key. A coworker who tried to get ArcInfo running on a
Windows XP guest on a Fedora host eventually just gave up.

You do have to divide your resources between machines, but given how
much RAM most machines come with these days, that's usually not much
of a problem (until you start talking about running multiple guest
OSes simultaneously). If you still have access to WinXP, I would
consider running Arc on that because of the minimal resource
requirements. 1-2 GB of RAM is all you will need (and you could get by
on <1 GB of RAM) assuming the guest OS isn't running anything other
than Arc. Make sure to dedicate some of your video memory to the guest
OS.

>
> d) On the course we ran the linux version of QGIS on a virtual machine. This
> has some attractions in terms of managing various clients projects. But what
> are the performance issues?
>
> Process wise I am likely to need to cover the gamut, from straightforward
> overlay to process models, 3D graphics and visualisation.

At my job I run QGIS in an Ubuntu VM on a Windows host (giving it 4
out of 12GB of RAM). I haven't noticed any performance issues. The
things that are typically slow elsewhere, e.g. multiple layers with
many (1000s) features, are still slow, but everything else performs
the same as a "real" OS of the same specifications.

Best,
--Lee

-- 
Lee Hachadoorian
PhD, Earth & Environmental Sciences (Geography)
Research Associate, CUNY Center for Urban Research
http://freecity.commons.gc.cuny.edu/