Hey there, gang:
Well, now that I have GRASS running on my OS X box and I am running through the SEEDS tutorial, I am going to start plaguing this mailing list with my pithy comments and observations on GRASS. 
Feel free to ignore them or berate me if they are too much. I'll try not to bombard the list with useless fluff.
The first thing I have run into is the way certain functions work through the text or the graphical interface. When I run g.list from the text interface I get the appropriate list of items within the Location, but then I can't get out of the list when it is done. I get an (END) at the bottom of the screen, but hitting Enter does not return me to my GRASS prompt. I have to go to another terminal window and kill the g.list process. On the other hand, the g.list function through the GUI works fine and doesn't hang. Has anyone else run into this problem?
In a similar vein, when I use "d.mon select=x0" through the GUI the WISH interface hangs, though the same function works fine through the text interface.
Someone mentioned that the GUI was pretty rough, but so far it seems fine to me. At least that is to say that it is about what I expected from an open-source project without the deep pockets of an ESRI to give it a slick finish.
I believe I read somewhere that you do need a database working with GRASS for Vector support, which seems pretty important coming form the primarily vector world of ArcView. At some point, I am going to have to solve the database problems I have had with GRASS on OS X, so if anyone is already has this setup working on OS X I would love to talk about it offline.
Bill
--
Bill Dickinson
GIS Specialist
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Environmental & Safety Branch, Code 250
wdickins@pop700.gsfc.nasa.gov
On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Bill Dickinson Jr wrote:
...
The first thing I have run into is the way certain functions work
through the text or the graphical interface. When I run g.list from
the text interface I get the appropriate list of items within the
Location, but then I can't get out of the list when it is done. I get
an (END) at the bottom of the screen, but hitting Enter does not
return me to my GRASS prompt. I have to go to another terminal window
and kill the g.list process. On the other hand, the g.list function
through the GUI works fine and doesn't hang. Has anyone else run into
this problem?
Pressing 'q' should get you out of it; it uses the system 'more' file
pager---lots of GRASS commands that display potentially long lists of
things do this.
I believe I read somewhere that you do need a database working with
GRASS for Vector support, which seems pretty important coming form
the primarily vector world of ArcView.
Only for *elegant* handling of multi-attribute data. You can get perfectly
good handling of single-attribute data and crude handling of
multi-attribute data (by manually manipulating category files) without
installing an external database. In addition GRASS' sites format can handle
multi-attribute data internally. BTW you can use an external database with
raster or sites data also; I was slightly wrong in my e-mail yesterday and
have updated the webpages accordingly.
Paul
Bill Dickinson Jr wrote:
Well, now that I have GRASS running on my OS X box and I am running
through the SEEDS tutorial, I am going to start plaguing this mailing
list with my pithy comments and observations on GRASS. Feel free
to ignore them or berate me if they are too much. I'll try not to
bombard the list with useless fluff.
The first thing I have run into is the way certain functions work
through the text or the graphical interface. When I run g.list from
the text interface I get the appropriate list of items within the
Location, but then I can't get out of the list when it is done. I get
an (END) at the bottom of the screen, but hitting Enter does not
return me to my GRASS prompt. I have to go to another terminal window
and kill the g.list process.
Pressing "q" will probably work.
Commands which may generate a significant amount of text typically
pipe their output through a pager. The default pager is "more" if
/bin/more exists, and "less" otherwise. If your terminal (e.g. xterm)
has an adequately-sized scroll-back buffer, you might wish to skip the
use of a pager with:
For a Bourne shell:
GRASS_PAGER=cat
export GRASS_PAGER
For a C shell:
setenv GRASS_PAGER cat
Someone mentioned that the GUI was pretty rough, but so far it seems
fine to me. At least that is to say that it is about what I expected
from an open-source project without the deep pockets of an ESRI to
give it a slick finish.
It's rough in the sense that it's basically just a menu and some
automatically generated dialogs. The overall design is
command-centred, rather than the data-centred approach which "real"
GUI programs use.
For display purposes, there is also "d.dm". This seems like a better
concept overall, but it's fairly limited in what it can do at present.
I believe I read somewhere that you do need a database working with
GRASS for Vector support, which seems pretty important coming form
the primarily vector world of ArcView.
This isn't the case in 5.0; it's entirely usable without an RDBMS.
OTOH, the experimental "5.1" version does make extensive use of
database functionality for vectors.
--
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net>
On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Glynn Clements wrote:
OTOH, the experimental "5.1" version does make extensive use of
database functionality for vectors.
But it uses the ASCII DBF file format by default and has native support
for it, so you don't actually need to install an external database to be
able to use SQL select statements etc. 5.1 is actually quite usable now
Paul