Please consult the full installation manual, available as a PDF file here for more details, operating specific notes and advanced installation options.

Installation procedure

Installing gvSIG using our customized installer is a snap. Download the installer package for your platform from our website and run it to start the installation procedure.

The following instructions are based on the Windows installer, but the versions for other platforms will work in an almost identical way. This guide will take you through the installation procedure step by step.

You do not need administrator rights to install this software, and you can install it into any location, including a USB pendrive.

The installer will greet you with a Welcome screen. Press “Next >” to advance to the license agreement.

This software comes under the GNU Public License, which is an open source license. Make sure you read and understand all of its terms and choose to accept it if you think it is suitable for you. You can only choose “Next >” and start the actual installation if you accept the licensing conditions.

The next step is to choose the installation directory. Click on the little folder icon to browse for an installation directory. Choose whatever place is suitable for you and press “Next >” once you have made your choice.

You can now select individual components to include in the installation. Select a component by clicking on its title to get a description. Although, due to its size, the North Carolina Data is not part of the default installation, we recommend you install it if you can afford the disk space, as this introduction is based on it. Press “Next >” when you have made your choice of components.

On Windows, you can choose whether to associate gvSIG project files (.gvp) with gvSIG. This will allow you to double-click such files and have them open up in gvSIG. If you want this, select “Yes” here. Then press “Next >”.

This setting is only for the current user. Due to its portable design, gvSIG does not deal with any system-wide settings.

The Performance Tweaking option allows you to reserve more of your PCs memory for gvSIG which can improve performance and stability when working with very large projects and many data layers. In most cases, however, the default setting will work just fine. Press “Next >”.

You can change this setting later by manually editing the gvSIG.ini (Windows) or gvSIG.sh (Linux, Mac OS X) file and entering different values for the -Xmx and -Xms options on the Java command line. Make sure you know what you are doing or gvSIG might not even start anymore after a change!

That’s it. Press “Next >” one more time to have the installer copy all required files to your hard disk. This can take a few minutes. When the installation is finished, you can choose to view some further information and launch gvSIG.

The installer will create an icon on your desktop which allows you to start gvSIG. On Windows systems, you should also find a “GvSIG OA Digital Edition” menu group in the Windows “Start” menu. From there you can launch gvSIG, browse related websites and documentation (in PDF format) or open one of our prepared sample project files.