I thought I'd give some feedback after a friend of mine picked up a copy
of OSGeoLive from this year's Intergeo conference in Nuremberg,
Germany. Sorry this feedback is a bit late.
- Firstly, it seems that although the OpenSource camp at the conference
was popular, the OSGeoLive DVD didn't have a high visibility. If I
hadn't asked my friend in advance to pick me up a copy, he'd never have
known that there was such a DVD. This contrasts greatly with the 2010
conference which was where I found out about the DVD in the first place
- in 2010 it was well publicised and even without asking, the attendees
were offered the free DVDs to try out. Somehow this wasn't happening at
all at the 2011 conference, which is a shame.
- Even when he knew to ask specifically for the DVD, the people running
the stands didn't know about it, or how to get it. In the end, he had
to revisit the area three times just to find someone who knew where the
box of DVDs was.
- He brought back the DVD for me, but it was version 4.5 (from April
2011), not the latest 5.0 which I guess should have been available in
time for the conference (September 2011). That's not a problem that
only the 4.5 DVDs were available, but I'd expect them to make more of an
effort to give them away. Now I guess they've got a pile of 4.5 DVDs
which are now not going to be used.
So I finally got to try out the DVD, and as I'd helped to put Prune on
the DVD, I was eager to try it out. The DVD works great, but from a
purely personal view I was disappointed to see that Prune wasn't obvious
in the menus. According to the contents pages it belongs to the
category "Navigation and maps", but I couldn't find Prune in that menu
(or any of the other category menus), or in any of the category folders
on the desktop. Only by searching through all the other menus did I
finally find it (in Applications -> Education for some reason). Once
I'd found it, it seems to work fine, but I'd appreciate it if Prune's
menu item could be included in the GIS-related folders rather than the
more general-sounding "Education" folder.
I don't know if this was fixed with 5.0, because I haven't had a chance
to try it out yet. I'll try and download it to check.
About the Intergeo itself though, I think the promotion of the DVD could
be greatly improved for next year's conference. So much work has gone
into making the DVD useful, that it seems a shame that the ideal target
audience at the Intergeo isn't getting to hear more about it.
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