The Esri Geoportal Server LiveDVD Demo was released on Monday, May 14^th. The demo provides a self-contained Linux operating system with a fully operational geoportal. You can evaluate your own personal geoportal without having to worry about installing or configuring one on a test machine. It works both as a bootable LiveDVD or a virtual machine (VM).

To use my copy from the esri.com website…

Esri Geoportal Server is a free, open source product that enables discovery and use of geospatial resources including datasets, rasters, and Web services. It helps organizations manage and publish metadata for their geospatial resources to let users discover and connect to those resources. The Geoportal Server supports standards-based clearinghouse and metadata discovery applications.

In the spirit of openness, I thought I’d talk about the development of this LiveDVD demo. I won’t be able to go into all the details and it will be greatly simplified but I’ll share the highlights.

As I was writing this post I realized that this article was going to be really long, so I’m breaking it up into a series of shorter posts. You see, there were five major parts to creating the LiveDVD:

1. Getting the Geoportal up and running.
2. Customizing the Geoportal
3. Customizing the Linux operating system interface.
4. The informational website, which pops open when the LiveDVD is started and provides information about the Geoportal as well as how to get started using the demo.
5. Converting the virtual machine to a LiveDVD.

This is Part 1: Getting the Geoportal up and running.

Most of the work on this part actual came before I started development on the LiveDVD. I had written a whitepaper, How to Set Up Esri Geoportal Server on Linux.

While the whitepaper makes it easy to set up a test instance of the Geoportal Server, I wanted an even easier way for people to try it out. And what’s easier than a LiveDVD with the geoportal already running?

LiveDVDs had been on my mind a lot. While writing the above whitepaper I was installing many different versions of the Linux operating system onto virtual machines for testing. There are many different distributions (versions) of the Linux operating system and most of their install disks are LiveDVDs where you can try out that version of Linux without installing it. I noticed that many of these LiveDVDs had sample software included and I thought that it would be cool if there was a LiveDVD with the Geoportal already installed for people to try out. It would be simple; just boot and go.

I also thought it would be easy to make because I had all these virtual machine with the Geoportal running on them from testing my whitepaper. I would just have to customize one, convert to a LiveDVD .ISO, and be good to go.

First I had to decide which version of Linux I wanted to go with. It had to be easily customizable, run on a wide variety of computer hardware, able for me to turn into a LiveDVD, and open for redistribution. I looked at Fedora, Ubuntu, CentOS, ArchLinux, and Debian. I went with Debian because it met all my requirements and was the easiest for me to customize.

I decided that the best way for me to create the LiveDVD was to create it first as a virtual machine that I would then convert to a LiveDVD. I created a new virtual machine in Oracle Virtual Box and installed a clean copy of the Debain Linux operating system. I then installed the Geoportal Server by following the steps from the How to Set Up Esri Geoportal Server on Linux whitepaper. That was the easy part…