Virtual Tiles@Home
From OpenStreetMap
It would be nice if more people ran fd Tiles@home on their PCs. But manually installing Tiles@home can be kind of complicated, espeacially if you are not familiar with Linux. It is possible to install it on Windows, but is said to be even more complicated. Virtual Tiles@Home (vt@h) is a new aproach to this problem.
How does Virtual Tiles@home work?
Software like VirtualBox allows you to emulate (simulate) a complete PC inside your real PC. The real PC is also called host PC. You may install any OS on your virtual PC, which may be different from your host OS. Whatever operating system you may be running (Windows, Mac, Linux), you can have a virtual PC running Linux, and you can use the host PC and the virtual PC at the same time.
Virtual tiles@home uses this possibility. You don't have to create a virtual PC and install Linux on it. We are creating a virtual PC that you can download and run without Linux knowledge. You start the virtual PC, and the PC starts rendering and uploading. Inside this virtual PC, there is a completely normal Tiles@home installation.
Status
This page is OUTDATED - since april 08 no update, see discussion page for test versions.
We have set up a virutal PC running Debian Linux 4.0r3 (Etch). All the Tiles@home software is installed and running. It is tested, and it already made some successful uploads as user BrianSchimmel.
This project is still in alpha status, that is, it is running but has undergone nearly no testing, and there are several known problems. At this stage, what we stated above would be wrong: You still need some linux knowledge, as well as PC knowlegde in general. If you are a beginner, wait some more weeks for us to finish our work.
We are currently writing some shell script that asks the user for his name/password. Until then, he had to fill in these into a configuration file. There are also huge security issues at the moment. We won't release vt@h into the public until they are fixed (maybe mid-february 2008 or even earlyer).
The current download size is about 300 MB, and uses about 1 GB on your drive in order to run. We will be able to reduce the download size, but the memory footprint of 1 GB will problably not reduce.
Downloads
- http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads - used to run the virtual PC. Available as closed source edition and open source edition. Both work, but if you want an installer, you have to choose the closed one.
- The virtual PC itself - still pending...
