[Qgis-user] What hardware for QGIS

Thu May 31 15:00:06 PDT 2012

Hi Neil,
I run QGIS on an iMac i3 (12GB RAM) and on a MacBook Pro i7 (8GB RAM). 
Both work fine.
Installation is super easy. Just follow William Kyngesburye's 
instructions as Lee has already mentioned.

I think, and I am neither a GIS nor a QGIS specialist (just a very 
limited user), combining QGIS with GRASS gives you the same range of 
functionality as ArcGIS has.
Again, I am not a hard core GIS person but I used it a bit for spatial 
modelling of hydrogeological and hydrological projects.
The GRASS installation is very easy on a Mac, too (again, follow 
William's instructions ... Thanks William!!!)

I also had run an ArcView version 9.3 on a virtual computer (on the 
iMac) using VirtualBox and Windows XP with a memory allocation of 4GB. 
That also worked fine without any issues. It certainly depends also on 
what you want to do. I am not sure about ArcInfo and a Dongle 
compatibility, referring to Lee's answer.

There is only one thing that I don't like that much with QGIS, which is 
making and editing good looking maps for presentations or publication. 
It seems a bit clunky to me (e.g. scale issues between QGIS desktop and 
map composer, rotation of labels (I have managed it but it took me 
forever to find out how), etc.).
It is absolutely likely that I don't know all the tricks and tweaks how 
to use it but this process seems to be a bit easier in Arc. I usually 
export the map and do the fine editing in a graphics software; however, 
it sometimes becomes a bit cumbersome when there is lots to edit that 
potentially could be done much easier by editing a layer in the GIS.
(to all the others, please comment on that. I want to learn  ... )

Hope that helps,

Cheers,
Harald

On 1/06/12 01:41, Lee Hachadoorian wrote:
> 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
>

-- 
Harald Hofmann
Research Fellow PhD - Hydrogeology
School of Geosciences - Monash University
Wellington Rd, Clayton, Victoria 3800
Australia
Phone: +61 3 99055786

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