The OpArc Project at the SFSCON

Hello everyone, 

this short post is to let anyone interested know that our presentation at SFSCON, held in Bolzano/Bozen at the NOI Techpark, has been published online. SFSCON stays for SFSCON stands for South Tyrol Free Software Conference and is one of Europe's most established annual conferences on Free Software.

This year we at Arc-Team decided to participate with a talk that summarized our approximately 20 years of experience in applying the Open Source philosophy to archaeology (both in the software and hardware fields).

The presentation was titled "Arc-Team and the OpArc Project" and can be viewed both on the conference's official website (where you can also download a PDF version) and on the conference's YouTube channel. 

I hope the presentation can be interesting for someone. Have a nice day! 

Reviving ArcheOS

 Hello everyone!

A while ago, I attended the ArcheoFOSS conference held at the University G.D'Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara (December 19-20, 2024). Unfortunately, due to being engaged in a project in Trentino, I couldn't stay long and only followed a few contributions. I plan to discuss my impressions of the workshop and my presentation on CesiumJS in another post. However, in this post, I want to talk about something that somewhat surprised me: people approaching me during breaks to ask why Arc-Team isn't releasing updated versions of ArcheOS anymore (here an article about its first release, back in 2005).

I regret to say that maintaining a GNU/Linux distribution dedicated to archaeology is quite challenging, and after several years, we at Arc-Team couldn't keep the project going. We felt it might be obsolete because many of the software we compiled and prepared for our distribution had become multi-platform or were already packaged for many GNU/Linux distributions, including Debian, which was the base for the latest versions of ArcheOS. Moreover many applications, including Arc-Team Manager, which we use to manage archaeological projects, now run on the server side.

However, according to the people I talked to at the workshop, ArcheOS was still useful not only for those who had trouble compiling specific software but also for anyone wanting a comprehensive overview of selected software for archaeology. This made me realize that ArcheOS could still be a valuable resource, so I decided to try reviving it, though I'm not under any illusions that it will be an easy process or guaranteed to succeed. 

Here's my roadmap:

1. Create a small GitHub project for a software list for ArcheOS.
2. Check the status of the software and compile and package any missing ones.
3. Create a new version of ArcheOS.

I'm currently working on the first step. If you'd like to help or are simply interested in the project, here are some links to check out:

ArcheOS-software-list (GitHub project)

Discussion on ResearchGate 

Thank you for your attention, any help is appreciated! 

Have a nice day!