The OSGeo4W stuff crept up on me quietly. Suddenly there's this cygwin-like installer that bundles Qgis, uDig, Grass, web-mapping, and all the lovely libs in one neato package. That's a win.

But I still wanted an easy way to install qgis without the use having to choose which of the packages they wanted, and set options to install, and not get confused by some of the other options in the installer. So I went on the hunt for how to do an unattended install from a set of packages (ie not from the internet).

Well, I finally got around to getting a Ubuntu 7.10 install going on my new EeePc (http://eeepc.asus.com/). 7 inches of GIS goodness after installing some base GIS software and then building the svn head of QGIS. I have a quick post on my blog:

Blog Post Link

As well as a quick video screen cast of using it. Lots of opportunity for a very small, very portable, very inexpensive field data collection tool, or ultra mobile GIS workstation.

About 4 months ago my hard drive and various other gubbins in my MacBook died. I spent then next three and a half or so months running the laptop off an external hard drive which has a bootable backup I had fortuitously made two weeks before the drive crash. After the MacBook was repaired a few weeks ago, I was handed back a clean slate in terms of the operating system install.

First of all thanks for the many comments and tests that people are carrying out on the windows test builds - we've had over 2000 downloads of the snapshots builds and the preview2 release for windows (combined) so I guess there must really be people using windows OS out there. :-)

I maintain the Ubuntu Build Notes for QGIS. Since I've just reformatted my hard drive, I took the opportunity to finalise the documentation for building QGIS 0.8 from source. I've split the old monolithic document into separate parts. The aforementioned link takes you to an index page which will grow over time as new versions of QGIS are created. Anyway I hope these updated build notes for 0.8 will help some of my fellow Ubunti-ites out there...

While most of us QGIS developers are GNU/Linux converts or Mac users, none of us really work on windows. Our userbase however is very much a different affair. Download statistics reveal that a great many of our users are (stuck?) on Windows. Offlist we have been discussing this situation and have decided to put more effort into quality control of the Windows version of QGIS.