[Talk-GB] [OSM-dev] Automating Freemap tile rendering

[Olivier Macchioni]

On 2/15/07, Nick Whitelegg <Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >I've been attempthing to put together a VMware "appliance" (read: virtual
> >machine) to do tiles at home rendering, so that people who don't want to
> install
> >and configure all the software can just run it in VMware Player instead.
> It's
> >working now, but I just need to tidy some of the menus and stuff (runs
> Debian,
> >but no Linux experience necessary to use it, in theory).
>
> 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).

- Running it requires the VMWare player which is free (
http://www.vmware.com/download/player/). No significant technical skills are
needed.

The performance hit of running VMWare as opposed to running the native
software exists, but it's not too big. I don't know how it handles the
architecture change between 32 and 64 bits.

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.

But the flexibility and expandability of VMWare is definitely a very good
point for that kind of applications.
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