Coming soon: Surftrackr VMWare images

Feb 29th 2008

For ease-of-use, I've been experimenting with use of VMWare to create a complete, fully-working Surftrackr installation (with free Linux distro "thrown in").

I'm trying to get the file-size down, but even at several Gigabytes, it should be possible to distribute the image on DVD. I won't be making images available for download since the bandwidth "hit" would be detrimental to the website's performance, and I'd probably get a nasty-gram from my ISP after just a few downloads.

So, in the next few days I hope to provide a system where you have a choice of implementation methods:

  1. Free download and set-up, just like at the moment. Surftrackr is free software and always will be.
  2. Paid-for DVD-by-post for a fee.

So, why would you want to pay for something you can download? Well, you might not, and that's fine. But the DVD images should help you in the following ways:

  1. Plug-and-play installation. Just copy the VMWare image to your hard-drive and start it up.
  2. Greatly reduced time spent on set-up. This might be important to you if you have better things to do than get to grips with Apache tweakage, virtual hosts and Python installation.
  3. The chance to support this project and redouble my enthusiasm (although I've no intention of stopping :)

The charge will not be high: just something to cover time and postage, and (as I said) you can always download if you'd prefer. I'll post more details in a day or two.

Please contact me if you have any comments or suggestions.