[GRASS5] ANN: GRASS on iPAQ/Linux available

[Carl Worth]

On May 7, Markus Neteler wrote:
 > Jan Stankovic and me may announce that (baby)GRASS is
 > running now on iPAQ/Linux:
 > 
 > http://grass.itc.it/grasshandheld.html

I'll follow that up by announcing that I've packaged up these same
binaries and contributed them to the Familiar distribution.

This means, that iPAQ users running Familiar can now simply do:

	ipkg install grass

to download and install grass. This will currently work as long as the
user is pointing at Familiar's "unstable" feed[*]. By the time
Familiar 0.5.3 is released, grass will be available as part of the
standard distribution.

If someone would like to install the package without pointing at the
unstable feed, then the following command will also work:

	ipkg install http://familiar.handhelds.org/familiar/feeds/unstable/packages/armv4l/grass_5.0.0-20020507-1_arm.ipk

A few notes on the package I made:

	o It installs its binary as /usr/bin/grass5 

	o All other files are in /usr/share/grass/,
	(eg. /usr/share/grass/bin, /usr/share/grass/etc, etc.)  This
	layout matches standard (FHS) practice and is cleaner than
	installing directories such as
	dist.armv4l-unknown-linux-gnu. Perhaps I should change it to
	/usr/share/grass5 though?

	o There is a bug in ipkg preventing it from installing
	packages with hard links correctly. So I expanded all the
	files in /usr/share/grass/bin into separate files. This bloats
	the package a bit, but I also stripped all the libraries which
	compensates almost exactly. (I plan to fix the bug in ipkg
	soon *blush*).

Things I would like to do next include making all of GRASS available
in separate packages, creating a better mechanism for doing partial
builds of grass, and adding package creation targets to the GRASS
makefiles.

 > Notes:
 > - we have to look again at d.zoom to get the 1-button mode working
 >   (it runs on iX86/Linux, but not on iPAQ)

I'll be looking into this right away.

 > - we still do not get "debugging symbols" present, but anyway - GRASS
 >   is working now

Markus, you asked for this. Your script passes "-s" to ld which
removes the debugging symbols, (although strip can shrink the
libraries you generated a bit more).

-Carl

[*] A user can point to Familiar's unstable feed by adding the
following line to /etc/ipkg.conf:

	src familiar-unstable http://familiar.handhelds.org/familiar/feeds/unstable/pack ages/armv4l

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth at east.isi.edu
3811 N. Fairfax Dr. #200, Arlington VA 22203		  703-812-3725