Ubuntu and GRASS

Saturday, 9 June, 2007

I have played around with various Linux distros over the years (and remember installing BeOS at one point!), and whilst they look nice, when it comes down to doing “real” work I end up getting stuck. So much of my software is Windows based, particularly for a lot of bespoke applications. And of course, with my move to primarily using USB apps, all the places I visit also use Windows. To be fair its less of a problem now with Linux running software like OpenOffice, FireFox, Thunderbird, GIMP etc. That said, Linux is still popularly a server system. However there have been big strides to make Linux cuddly, friendly and generally just as user-friendly and easy to install as Windows or MacOS.

The distribution that has been really helping here is Ubuntu and its lighter weight siblings Xubuntu and Edubuntu. These really are easy to install and use with everything you need for a “typical” home office system. What has really shifted me in this direction is the long term open-source GIS, GRASS. This is available for Windows, however the Linux version is the primary product that is more stable and has better features. So this has shifted me in the direction of Linux, but how best to use it??

Well the obvious answer is to install it! This could be on an old system, on my main system in dual-boot mode or with a removable hard drive. All of which really involves too much fiddling about. Which brought me back to our old friend virtualisation that we have been using to run ArcIMS in the student labs. There are two main products, VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC, which are vying for trade and both offer free, full functional, versions. I tried both, but in the end Virtual PC was faster and more stable so won out. Any modern PC should be able to run Ubuntu or Xubuntu pretty fast with no desperate problems, and being virtual you can just kill the system and start again if there are any problems. You need to go over to the Ubuntu website and download the latest ISO image which can be loaded in to Virtual PC as a CDROM drive, booted from to give a “Live CD” running Ubuntu and then used to install a full system. Xubuntu kept freezing on me, so I stayed with Ubuntu.

Unfortuantely the latest Linux kernel has a bug which renders the mouse unusable. A quick Google brought up a a fix which, whilst a pain, at least gets things working. It sets up a keyboard mouse, which allows you to install the system. You then drop back to a command prompt, load in a new patch and then reboot with it all working. In particular, when you get to a reboot you need to follow the commands below:

1. reboot in recovery mode by pressing ESC on the GRUB screen
2. wget http://librarian.launchpad.net/7583925/unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
3. chmod +x unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
4. ./unsupported-patch-for-87262.sh
5. reboot

You should now have a fully virtual Ubuntu system sitting in Virtual PC into which you can install GRASS (and it should be hooked up to the network through your PC). However thats a story for the next blog.

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