OK, I’m excited to announce that the new version of Portable GIS, complete with the latest versions (as of today- I have to draw the line somewhere) of all the software, is now in testing phase and pretty much ready to release. It’s a bit slicker that the previous version, and comes with some extra software and utilities. Here is my problem: the last release weighed in at just less that 1GB downloaded, but the new one looks like coming in at approx 1.

Part of my fabulous new plans for portable gis (which will be revealed soon-ish) involve including a database replication option. This might or might not work on the USB drive, but it needs to be open source, portable, and connect to postgresql at the very least. I have been looking at a couple of options for this, without a vast amount of success, it has to be said. The packages that I have tried are: Daffodil Replicator, dbreplicator (a fork of daffodil replicator), Symmetric-DS, and db -connector for Funambol.

Someone (thanks Bruce) has alerted me to a mistake in Portable GIS, which luckily requires a very minor patch- so minor that I am not going to release a new version now and force everyone to download it again, although it will be fixed in the next version. Basically there is a line in the apache config that doesn’t update it’s drive letter because the slashes are the wrong way around.

I was contacted by someone who has downloaded portable GIS, very sensibly asking for information on the postgresql connection details. When I tried to respond to this person, their email address bounced back with a permanent failure, so I thought I’d better write something here so he doesn’t think I’m not replying! Now, I was sure that I had included a readme file specific to the postgresql installation, but it looks like the pixies might have eaten it.

Update: Due to issues with our download server, portable gis is not currently available. Investigations are taking place as to the exact cause and I will announce when it is fixed, though this may take a few days as I am away over the weekend. Thanks for your patience and your interest! Version 1.2 of Portable GIS has been released today, addressing a number of bugs in Version 1.1. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and spotted the bugs.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t really put it off any further… The very first release of Portable GIS is now available for download here. Phew! While you don’t have to register to download, it would be nice if you did, so I know who is interested and can contact about updates. No spam, I promise. For people that don’t read the readme: this is not cross-platform, it’s for windows only. Unzip it and move the folders inside to the root of a USB stick, then double-click on the menu exe to access the programmes.

Well, there was I just working away in the office, on my super-cool portable GIS setup, doing some work on a postgresql-driven database all working nicely on the USB stick. I should say that this has been working just fine in both my home (Vista) and office (XP) environment for months now. Time came to head off home, so I stopped everything, ejected the stick nicely, took it home and went to start working on it again… only for postgresql to refuse to work.

Well that’s the first official day of FOSS4G 2007 over and done with. A good time was had by all I believe. We kicked off with the opening sessions- of which the highlight for me was the lightning talks. Just like [last year]((https://archaeogeek.com/blog/2006/09/14/of-neogeography-and-mashups/), Schuyler Earle managed to say more thought-provoking and interesting things in fifteen minutes than, well, most other people can. His talk was entitled “Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Programme”, which sounds dull as ditch water but succinctly highlighted the clusters and trends amongst the various talks at this year’s conference, dressed up in high end stats speak.

One of the things that I wanted to do with my portable GIS was to include a menu on the USB stick to tie everything together and provide easy access to the configuration files. The first option I looked at was PStart, but that’s not open source and has quite a limited license. Luckily (again) a saviour has come along, in the shape of Tim Fehlman’s USB Drive Menu. This started off as freeware but he has now made it Open Source so it’s ideal.