[OSM-dev] Automating Freemap tile rendering

[matthew-osm at newtoncomputing.co.uk]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 10:54:25AM +0100, Olivier Macchioni wrote:
> >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.

> It's probably possible to have a much smaller version which would install
> itself from the Web, downloading .deb packages - thus putting a bit more
> load on Debian's servers and a bit less on OSM's :P

Yes, I wasn't expecting to put it on OSM's servers, though.

> Another option could be qemu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/) which is
> similar to VMWare but fully GPL. I don't know what performance hit it would
> induce CPU-wise nor how complex it is to use as opposed to VMWare.

I haven't tried qemu since the kernel accelerator module became free. It may now
be fast enough to handle this.

The other option, for Linux users, is an image to run with User Mode Linux.
However, this would be more difficult to set up, and is only really aimed at
Linux users. Of course, everyone should be a Linux user, but for those who
haven't worked this out yet, VMware is easier ;-)

-- 
Matthew