[OSM-dev] Automating Freemap tile rendering

[matthew-osm at newtoncomputing.co.uk]

[removed from talk-gb - this seems just dev to me now]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 09:25:29AM +0100, Olivier Macchioni wrote:
> >That sounds like a good idea. How easy is it to set up a VMware appliance?
> >
> >
> - Creating it is as easy as installing a new computer from scratch, but it
> requires a VMWare license AFAIK (unless you start from one of the free
> pre-built images available, but you will have limitations).

You can use the free VMware Server to create them; you don't have to buy
anything.

An "appliance" is literally a complete install that is designed to do one task.
Not sure I like the term "appliance", but that seems to be what VMware call it.

> The significant drawback to me is that users would need to download a full
> VMWare image including a full OS and the OSM specific software (probably
> several MB at least) versus downloading a simple executable file. It will
> definitely be several order of magnitude less than the planet OSM dump
> anyways.

Yes, it's never going to be small. You have the overhead of the operating system
as well as the required programs and libraries. I've currently got a working
version based on a very cut-down Debian in a 500M image, including about 100M
for swap and 100M free space. After compression, the download is likely to be
about 150M.

-- 
Matthew