In the past, professional spatial analysis in the business sector was equivalent to buying an ArcGIS license, storing the data in some kind of Esri database, and publishing results with the ArcGIS Server. These trends seem to be changing in the favor of open source software. As FOSS (free and open source software) products are gaining more and more power due to the hard work of the enthusiastic open source GIS community, they pique the curiosity of the business sector at a growing rate. With the increasing number of FOSS GIS experts and consulting companies, both training and documentation--the two determining factors that open source GIS products traditionally lacked--are becoming more available.
For this book, you will need to have a computer with mid-class computing capabilities. As
the open source GIS software is not that demanding, you don't have to worry about your
hardware specification when running the software, although some of the raster processing
tools will run pretty long (about 5-10 minutes) on slower machines.
What you need to take care of is that you have administrator privileges on the machine you
are using, or the software is set up correctly by an administrator. If you don't have
administrator privileges, you need to write the privilege at least to the folder used by the
web server to serve content.
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