[GRASS-user] launching a gui


> Dear Moritz

> Many thanks for the quick reply - and for your excellent tutorial, which I am finding most helpful.
> Your suggested remedy, that of using gis.m, is unfortunately not working for me.
> There is no error message, just nothing at all.
> Perhaps I should have mentioned that, when I first start Grass, I get two error messages.
> They are

> sh: clear: command not found
> /usr/local/grass-6.2.3/etc/Init.sh: line 635: tput: command not found

> I have had a look in Init.sh and the bad line reads ‘tput clear’.
> Without asking you to spend a lot of time on the matter, could you briefly suggest something else that I might try?
> Is there something that I have failed to download?

ncurses ?
Any special reason why you want to use the cygwin version ? The native windows versions have become pretty good by now.

At Moritz’s suggestion I have downloaded ncurses - indeed, the full Utils package - from Cygwin.
And the two error messages, of which I was complaining, have disappeared.

MORITZ IS A GENIUS

But, gis.m still does not work.
It looks as though the default Cygwin download, which is not a full download, is not enough.
I was hoping to use Cygwin because most of the online tutorials assume a Unix environment.
Some of the tutorials are themselves tar.gz files.
And Marcus’s book is quite expensive.
I don’t want to buy the book unless the Cygwin/Grass combination works.
So I have started using the native Windows version of Grass, at first with the Spearfish60 data.
And I have made some progress.
But ‘d.vect roads’ does not change what I see on the screen.
It creates a file called ‘map.png’.
Sorry to keep asking for help, but how do I display the ‘roads’ map in a window?

On 14/04/09 21:18, Chris Heys wrote:

At Moritz's suggestion I have downloaded ncurses - indeed, the full Utils package - from Cygwin.
And the two error messages, of which I was complaining, have disappeared.
MORITZ IS A GENIUS

No, I was just the one who answered... :slight_smile:

But, gis.m still does not work.
It looks as though the default Cygwin download, which is not a full download, is not enough.

Did you follow the instructions here:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass62/binary/mswindows/
and here:
http://geni.ath.cx/grass.html#_Binary_distribution_for_Cygwin_Deprecated_by_MS-Windows_native_binary
?

I was hoping to use Cygwin because most of the online tutorials assume a Unix environment.

I don't think that the Unix environment is so much of an issue, but rather the use of the command line. For an introduction to the GUI, you should start by reading [1] and [2]. You can also try some of the tutorial listed on the OSGEO education material website [3].

Some of the tutorials are themselves tar.gz files.
And Marcus's book is quite expensive.
I don't want to buy the book unless the Cygwin/Grass combination works.
So I have started using the native Windows version of Grass, at first with the Spearfish60 data.
And I have made some progress.
But 'd.vect roads' does not change what I see on the screen.
It creates a file called 'map.png'.

Yes, the command line d.* commands used in the tutorials all suppose the existance of X-monitors. These do not work on Windows, however, (and do not exist in grass7 anymore, BTW) and all display has to either through the GUI (either tcltk-based or the new wxpython-based) or directly into a file (actually the GUI also just displays the content of files).

If you want to follow the tutorial from the command line, you should find a viewer which will automatically update a file which has changed. You can then point it to map.png and just leave it open while you experiment with the d.* commands. You will probably have to set the environment variable GRASS_PNG_READ=TRUE, so that each d.* command doesn't erase the results of the previous one. I personnally use gqview for which there is a Win port [4], but there's tons of others.

You can also try the internal ximgview [5], but I don't know if this works in the windows version, nor if it is included in any of the 6* binaries.

Moritz

[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/gis.m.html
[2] http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/wxGUI.html
[3] http://www.osgeo.org/educational_content (or still a bit more complete old version: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Educational_Content_Inventory)
[4] http://gqview-win.sourceforge.net/
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2008-October/040589.html