I need to choose a GIS system for a small university research centre. We are handling a broad range of data, (for example, numerical tidal analyses, weather data, poverty, isolated economic activity, skills availability and renewable energy resource availability) and operate primarily in countries with relatively poor existing data sets. 

We interact with other groups, some of which use ARCGIS. Do I have to wade through every GIS software descriptor on the web, or can someone please give an indication of likely candidates? 


Question: Redhat: non-root user needs to copy files to a NFS share
Answer: The mount command can only be executed as root on most Linux systems, because it has a setuid of root set. There are 2 possible work arounds using the mount command, but they require that the root user (or somebody that can sudo to root) make some changes.


Have them add an entry to /etc/fstab for the desired share. The noauto option is important.

vi /etc/fstab
&lt;nfs ip or FQDN&gt;:/      /mnt/       nfs rw,noauto,user,timeo=14,hard,intr 0 0


Then have them run mount for the desired directory

mount /mnt/

Add the user to the suders file, specifying use of the mount command. Please note that this is less secure, because they can essentially mount anything on the file system. Run visudo and add a line like this:

afhood    ALL=(ALL) /usr/bin/mount

Perform some form of network based copying to the remote file system such as scp, rcp, ftp, sftp, etc. The specific command you would use is completely dependent on what the remote system allows and what you have installed on your system.