WinGRASS 6.3.0 - GRASS Windows-Native Experimental Project

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Release Notes
  • Install GRASS
  • Sample Data
  • Launching GRASS
  • New GRASS Python GUI
  • Missing Modules
  • Known Issues
  • How to Submit Bugs
  • Build GRASS From Source
  • GRASS Development Team
  • Credits and Contacts

  • Introduction

    GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a free, open source Geographical Information System (GIS) capable of handling raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphic data.

    GRASS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

    Visit the GRASS GIS main web site at http://grass.osgeo.org/

    Release Notes

    WinGRASS is a GRASS Development Team project, with the goal of creating a Microsoft Windows native binary port of GRASS.

    WinGRASS is an experimental project, still at an alpha stage, and it can't be considered a complete and fully working release of GRASS for Windows. Some features are missing (see Missing Modules section in this document), some known bugs still need to be fixed (see Known Issues section) and other features may not work.

    If you need a robust, bug-free release of GRASS on Windows you should install the Cygwin version of GRASS 6.3.0, available at http://grass.osgeo.org/grass63/binary/mswindows/cygwin/.

    See also http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WinGRASS_Current_Status.

    The current release of WinGRASS, based on GRASS 6.3.0, has been built on a i686 machine in the MinGW environment and contains parts of the following open source softwares and libraries:

    Software/Library (Release):

  • MSYS (1.0.11)
  • Flex (2.5.4a-1)
  • Bison (2.1)
  • Zlib (1.2.3)
  • Libpng (1.2.24)
  • Libtiff (3.8.2)
  • Freetype (2.3.5)
  • FFTW (3.1.2)
  • PDCurses (3.3)
  • PROJ.4 (4.6.0)
  • GEOS (2.2.3)
  • GSL (1.9)
  • Expat (2.0.1)
  • PostgreSQL (8.2.6)
  • SQLite (3.5.6)
  • GDAL (1.5.1) *
  • Tcl/Tk (8.5.1)
  • * with GEOS, Expat, PostgreSQL and SQLite support enabled

    The current package contains a complete build (libraries and executables) of all the items listed above, except for PostgreSQL, for which the package provides only the main dynamic library.

    All the above softwares and libraries have been built from sources on a i686 machine in the MinGW environment, with the exception of MSYS, provided by MinGW Project on SourceForge.NET (http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml), Flex and Bison, provided by GnuWin32 Project on SourceForge.NET (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/).

    The current release of GRASS 6.3.0 has been built with the following configuration:

    GRASS is now configured for:  i686-pc-mingw32
    
     Source directory:            /usr/local/src/grass-6.3.0
     Build directory:             /usr/local/src/grass-6.3.0
     Installation directory:      ${prefix}/grass-6.3.0
     Startup script in directory: ${exec_prefix}/bin
     C compiler:                  gcc -g -O2 
     C++ compiler:                c++ -g -O2
     Building shared libraries:   yes
     64bit support:               no
     OpenGL platform:             Windows
    
      NVIZ:                       yes
    
      BLAS support:               no
      C++ support:                yes
      DWG support:                no
      FFMPEG support:             no
      FFTW support:               yes
      FreeType support:           yes
      GDAL support:               yes
      GLw support:                no
      JPEG support:               no
      LAPACK support:             no
      Large File Support (LFS):   yes
      Motif support:              no
      MySQL support:              no
      NLS support:                no
      ODBC support:               no
      OGR support:                yes
      OpenGL support:             yes
      PNG support:                yes
      PostgreSQL support:         yes
      Python support:             no
      Readline support:           no
      SQLite support:             yes
      Tcl/Tk support:             yes
      wxWidgets support:          no
      TIFF support:               yes
      X11 support:                no
      MacOSX application:         no

    Install GRASS

    If you had already installed a previous release of WinGRASS (6.3.0RC5 or 6.3.0RC6), please uninstall it before to install the current WinGRASS release. Open the Add/Remove Programs application from the Windows Control Panel, select GRASS and remove it.

    Please, note that the uninstall procedure will erase the whole GRASS install direcory. Because of that we strongly recommend you to backup all your personal data stored in it before to uninstall GRASS.

    To install GRASS launch WinGRASS-6.3.0-Setup.exe and follow the instructions in it.

    If installed into a directory that has spaces in either its name or the path of directories leading up to it, some functionalities of GRASS might be hampered. We would highly appreciate if you tried and reported any problems, so that we can fix them. However, if you want to avoid any such issues, we recommend that you choose a simple installation path without spaces, such as C:\GRASS.

    The WinGRASS Installer has been made using the OpenSource NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) software, available at: http://nsis.sourceforge.net

    Sample Data

    As install option, you can also download and install the following GRASS sample data sets:

    North Carolina Data Set

    Used as sample data in the book "Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach", 3rd edition, this data set is a comprehensive collection of raster, vector and imagery data covering parts of North Carolina (NC), USA (map), prepared from public data sources provided by the North Carolina state and local government agencies and Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF).

    See also http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php

    South Dakota Data Set

    Also known as Spearfish data set, it contains raster, vector and point data of South Dakota, USA (UTM projection, Clarke66 ellipsoid, NAD27 conus)

    See also http://grass.osgeo.org/download/data6.php

    The sample data files will be installed into a directory called GIS DataBase, that will be created in your Documents folder.

    Launching GRASS

    You have three options for launching GRASS:

    The easiest is to click on the GRASS icon in the GRASS Start menu folder or on the Desktop.

    If you prefer working in text mode on the command line, you can also launch cmd.exe (Start Menu -> Run command -> type cmd.exe and click on Run) and type c:\PathToYourGrassInstallation\grass63.bat -text plus enter. If you want to launch the GUI, just type gis.m and then enter.

    Finally, if you want to work in a unix/linux-like shell environment, you can launch GRASS from MSYS shell: open MSYS from the GRASS Start menu folder, type grass63 and then enter.

    New GRASS Python GUI

    We would highly appreciate if you also tested the new GRASS Python GUI.

    To do that you'll need to install the following additional third-party software components:

    Python

    Download the Python installer

    Install to %PROGRAMFILES%\Python

    Add %PROGRAMFILES%\Python to your PATH system variable.

    Python Extensions

    Download the Python Extensions installer

    Just launch the installer, it will automatically set the correct install path.

    wxPython

    Download the wxPython installer

    Install to %PROGRAMFILES%\Python\Lib\site-packages

    NumPy

    Download NumPy installer

    Install to %PROGRAMFILES%\Python

    Finally, to start GRASS with the new Python GUI, open a MSYS shell, type grass63 -wxpython and then enter.

    Please, note that the new GRASS Python GUI is still at a highly experimental stage, and that the vector digitizer is disabled in it.

    See also http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WxPython-based_GUI_for_GRASS

    Missing Modules

    The following modules are missing in the current WinGRASS release:

  • r.li.daemon
  • r.li.edgedensity
  • r.li.patchdensity
  • r.li.patchnum
  • r.li.shape
  • r.li.simpson
  • r.li.shannon
  • r.li.mps
  • r.li.mpa
  • r.li.padcv
  • r.li.padsd
  • r.li.padrange
  • r.li.cwed
  • r.li.richness
  • r.li.dominance
  • Known Issues

    See http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WinGRASS_Current_Status#Known_Issues

    How to Submit Bugs

    We would highly appreciate if you contributed to WinGRASS project by submitting bugs to http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ or informing us about them through the Windows GRASS Mailing List (http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-windows).

    Build GRASS From Source

    Information on how to build GRASS from source code on Windows in a MinGW environment are available at http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/BuildingOnWindows

    GRASS Development Team

    The GRASS Development Team is a multi-national group consisting of scientists and developers participating from various fields.

    For more information, see http://grass.osgeo.org/community/team.php

    Credits and Contacts

    WinGRASS project has been created and is currently developed by the GRASS Development Team.

    The WinGRASS self-contained binary package (including all the builds and the installer script) is provided by Marco Pasetti.

    This document has been written by Marco Pasetti, in agreement with the GRASS Development Team.

    To contact them, e-mail to: GRASS Development Mailing List (http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev).