OSGeoLive 14.0
Being cooped up in his home office, Mayank Sharma’s quest to travel the world leads him to a distro that brings the world to him.
Being cooped up in his home, Mayank Sharma’s quest to travel the world leads him to a distro that brings the world to him.
OSGeoLive is a Lubuntu based distro that pulls together a library of open source tools and applications to support all kinds of geospatial use cases. The distro isn’t designed as a general-purpose distro, but rather as a daily driver for individuals who work with geospatial tools.
Geospatial refers to all data and the associated tech that’s used to acquire, manipulate and store geographic information. Geospatial tools are used by data specialists, science researchers, cartographic professionals and map hobbyists.
There’s no dearth of robust open source geospatial tools. The OSGeoLive distro ships with several of them, which the developers claim are pre-configured to suit a range of geospatial use cases. The distro also caters to new users by helping them sort through the myriad options and find pre-configured tools to suit all workflows.
The OSGeoLive project is backed by the not-forprofit OSGeo Foundation, which also supports the development of several open source geospatial projects. It also promotes the use of the distro for educational purposes and for use in the real-world.
Charting the world
OSGeoLive is distributed as a traditional ISO image that can be copied on a DVD or a USB drive. The advantage of copying the image to USB is that you can enable persistence and save any changes you make in the Live environment. The project also puts out a vmdk virtual disk that can be attached to VMware and VirtualBox virtual machines.
OSGeoLive only accepts established open source projects, but still manages to include about 50 geospatial tools, along with several free world maps and sample datasets. The specialised programs are all housed within the Geospatial meta category, which is further subdivided into relevant groups such as Desktop GIS, Navigation and Maps, Web Services and more.
Each category lists a handful of tools. While they wouldn’t be of use to the casual user, the fact that these are pre-configured goes a long way in helping the geospatially inclined users to use them for productive purposes without delay.
There are traditional desktop GIS programs for viewing, editing and analysing geospatial data. Then there are browser-based clients, some of which offer functions that were previously only available in desktop applications. The distro also includes web services that can be used to fetch map data in various formats.
The Navigation and Maps category has some familiar tools such as the Marble virtual globe, as well as OpenStreetMaps along with its JOSM and iD editors.
Supplementing the geospatial tools are several sources of free mapping data. For instance, there’s one that provides cartographers with public domain maps that helps them create small-scale world, regional and country maps, and another that includes both historical and predicted temperature and precipitation details.
According to the release notes, the latest release has added a couple of new tools, besides improvements to the distro’s documentation and translations.
For package management, OSGeoLive relies on the Muon package manager, which uses the default Ubuntu repositories along with the OSGeoLive’s PPA. For installation, the distro uses the standard Lubuntu installer, which is Calamares.
OSGeoLive is one of those distros that’s more than a sum of its parts. It isn’t just a collection of the best open source geospatial tools, but has instead been carefully put together to ensure users can access the tools straight after booting into the distro.