Portable GIS Version 2 is released

The philosophy behind the idea „GIS on a USB stick“ was to provide beginners with a ready-installed and configured stack of open source GIS tools that would run in windows without the need for emulation or a live cd. By taking out the often difficult installation and configuration, the hope is to make it easier for beginners to get started with open source GIS, so they are not put off before it gets interesting and fun.
Not only that, but having a fully self-contained GIS system may prove useful in a number of real-life situations.

The newly updated version 2 contains a self-contained installer, updated versions of all the constituent software packages, a new control panel, and improved documentation.

The current set of software includes:

• Desktop GIS packages QGIS (with GRASS plugin), uDIG and gvSIG,
• FWTools (GDAL and OGR toolkit)
• XAMPPlite (Apache2/MySQL5/Php5),
• PostgreSQL (version 8.4)/Postgis (version 1.4),
• Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache, Featureserver, and Geoserver web applications.

The packages and menu system are all open source, but each component has a separate license. Some of the components have been altered in order to make them drive-letter independent.