History

From HostGISLinux

The HostGIS Linux project was started in August 2004, to make my own life much easier. Installing the entire UMN MapServer stack is a huge pain, riddled with pitfalls and undocumented features, and often taking hours of effort even for a seasoned sysadmin. My goal was to create a Linux system with the entire UMN MapServer stack and all of its dependencies, and all of the peripheral features, and a bunch of additional GIS-related software, so that right out of the box I could grab a mapfile, start editing, and have a map in under an hour. And here it is.

A rough timeline of HostGIS Linux's development goes something like this:

• August/September 2004 -- Version 1.0, which was not widely available to the public. It was based on CoreLinux, a Linux distro aimed at being minimal and therefore small. The download was about 100 MB.

• Over the next several months, we went through the 2.0 series. It was much the same, though the increasing size of the CD image led me to drop the boot CD also playing a full-fledged disaster-recovery CD, as such functionality added 200 MB of disk space to the download.

• April-July 2005 -- Finally, HostGIS Linux went public with the 3.0 release, which was based on Slackware Linux 10.2, dropping CoreLinux behind us. This also saw PostGIS reaching a 1.0 beta, the addition of several peripheral utilities, and the addition of ECW and JPEG2000 support. June 2005 also saw OSG 2005, where we presented HostGIS Linux in front of hundreds of people sparking much interest.

• The 3.6 series kept active through September 2006, seeing many minor upgrades and bugfixes, as well as the addition of many software packages, both for GIS application and for system administration. 2006 was a very active time for open source geospatial software, reaching major milestones in PostGIS, PostgreSQL, UMN MapServer and the rise of new mapping frameworks based on UMN MapServer.

• January 1 2007 was the official release of HostGIS Linux 4.0 The most significant milestone of 4.0 was that a 64-bit version was now available, but also significant were the usual bugfixes, hardware compatibility, and added software which comes with time and user requests.

• November 2007 saw the 4.2 release, which included UMN MapServer 5.0.0 and the new AGG rendering library, as well as enhanced support for PCMCIA devices, wireless networking, and RAID controllers, and more software additions.

HostGIS Linux remains in active development, but don't let that scare you. It's widely used in production environments worldwide, from server hosting companies to small governments, by thousands of people.