So, it’s 5 years since OSGeo was formed- that’s pretty cool! Spurred on by this post, I thought I would say a little bit about my involvement with OSGeo, and also rather clumsily segue this into an announcement about my impending change of job. It’s true- after years of not really thinking of myself as an archaeologist any longer, but rather ‘someone who works in an archaeological unit", I’ve finally gone and got myself a real job.

I don’t often (ever?) ask for help on my blog but I’ve hit a snag with my continuing investigations into installing mapguide open source on ubuntu. My questions on the mailing list haven’t been answered, so I’m hoping that some kind blog reader will help me out. The problem: I can only use arbitrary x-y coordinate systems. This is officially recognised as bug 582, where categories.txt is in the wrong place, and a fix has been suggested.

Edit (Jan 2008): Since Mapguide is being continually developed, these instructions are now a little out of date. For the most up to date instructions you should see the wiki pages on the osgeo site that I and others have been working on. As promised, here are my instructions for installing the svn version of mapguide open source on Ubuntu 6.06 server. Standard disclaimer- I did this with a lot of help from the Autodesk team (thanks Trevor).

Whew, it’s been a busy and eventful week or so. More detailed posts to follow, but here’s a brief roundup of all that’s new in the world of Archaeogeek. Finally got Mapguide Open Source compiled and working on Ubuntu My presentation on Portable GIS has been accepted for FOSS4G 2007 My southern counterpart is off to do his PhD On that last point, we will be advertising soon to fill Leif’s post (more about it on his blog) and are always on the lookout for archaeological computing types at both offices, so if you’re interested then get in touch and let’s talk!

Archaeogeek is now back in the saddle/desk-chair after a few weeks break- firstly entertaining visiting parents and most recently scuba-diving in the Sound of Mull (Scotland) In the mean time I have a few projects coming to fruition, and have been catching up on a few things that I wanted to learn more about (hello google maps and database integration). Firstly, we at Oxford Archaeology have been fortunate to have the services of a very skilled and enthusiastic work-placement student called Matt Jones from the University of Southampton for the last few weeks and he has been helping up get our basic web-based mapping sorted.

Well, at last it’s OK for me to tell people that Oxford Archaeology now has a WFS server that is accessible from the outside world. The address is: http://mapdata.thehumanjourney.net/cgi-bin/mapservwfs.cgi It’s a standard MapServer setup, and at the moment contains static data about the sites we have worked on over the last thirty years. This is still a work in progress and there are a whole bunch of things I would like to improve (but at least it’s up and out there):

Well, my first attempt at getting Mapguide Opensource working on Ubuntu screeched to a massive halt last week with some version conflicts that even the mighty mailing list couldn’t solve. I’m kinda hopeful that if I start from scratch and install only the absoloute basics, then I might avoid the same problem. Unfortunately I can’t get anyone on the list to admit that they’ve successfully managed to install it on Ubuntu, otherwise I could pick their brains mercilessly!

Well, I’m three days in to trying to compile and install the latest version of MapGuide OpenSource on Ubuntu Dapper Drake and it’s quite hard going. Maybe it’s just naivety on my part, but I’m constantly amazed at how many other packages are required, that are not in the documentation, before the various components will install. It’s not the first time I’ve done this either, as I tried it on Suse 9 and Fedora 4 last year and I had the same problem then.

Well, today was day one of the FOSS4G conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. I’m a bit of a conference n00b, having only made it to UK events in the past, and certainly nothing of this size or calibre. So, couple that with the fact that I’ve forgotten most of my school french or german vocab and it’s been a learning experience! The workshops that I attended today were on MapGuide Open Source, which was what I was concentrating on when I signed up but I think I would rather have attended the workshop on PostGIS instead of the Introduction to MapGuide Open Source this morning.