Over the last few days I have been putting together a virtual machine image of an Ubuntu 12.04 install set up to act as an OSM tileserver and Nominatim server. The Virtualbox virtual machine image boots up and after logging in and running the ‘startx’ command to start the graphical environment, has a “configuration wizard” script on the desktop.

Running this wizard will prompt you to download an OSM PBF extract to the desktop. This PBF file will then be loaded into either a tile rendering database, or a Nominatim database, or both. The configuration is entirely point and click and took about 30 minutes to have a fully functional tileserver and Nominatim server with up to date coastlines downloaded automatically for the Washinton, DC, extract (about a 10 mb PBF extract, processed on a typical dual core PC). I wrote a wiki page about how I set up the virtual machine starting from the bare Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit desktop build to the fully functional server.

The 2.2 gb virtual machine image can be downloaded via BitTorrent using the following torrent file or magnet link. You will find a Readme file in the torrent telling you how to import and boot the image in Virtualbox and further instructions in the VM image itself.

http://data.osm-hr.org/OSM_Server_v0.1.torrent

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:IYDWGYFZYN5CLYRYZOSPH7A7IOKLKPNY&tr=udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80

I hope people find this VM fun and useful to play around with. Hopefully now when people want a quick testserver for an app they are developing, or people who want to scrape tiles, or do bulk geocoding can easily download and run this VM on their own hardware, and avoid placing undue load on the OSM community’s donated servers.

Please share any comments or feedback about the VM either in the comments here, or on the talk page on the wiki.

-AndrewBuck