[GRASS5] WinGRASS binaries on itc.it site incorrectly compiled

Michael Barton michael.barton at asu.edu
Sat Jan 31 11:54:03 EST 2004


I've been getting a series of lab computers ready for my spatial 
technologies class to use with GRASS. This involved setting up a couple 
of PC's so far with Cygwin and WinGRASS.

I've run into a couple of problems

1st. there is still a problem in getting a monitor to display using any 
of the TclTk menu system, including the display manager. I've 
corresponded with  Glynn Clements about it and have a work around, that 
involves opening all monitors from the command line using d.mon prior 
to doing anything else. He seems to have a good idea of what the 
problem is. Given the discussions about releasing 5.3 (which I 
generally agree with), it will be worthwhile to continue to look into a 
way to solve the xdisplay issues with WinGRASS.

The 2nd problem is (hopefully) easily fixed. Currently NVIZ won't work 
using the available binaries for GRASS 5.0.3. To make sure I have the 
most recent set, I re-downloaded and installed the binaries from the 
Trento (grass.itc.it) site yesterday. These are dated 11 November 2003. 
It seems that they have been compiled with a series of unneeded and 
even problematic Cygwin dependencies.

When I tried NVIZ, it started to open, but generated the following 
error:

Error window title:
      NVWISH 2.2 - unable to find component
Error window contents:
      This application has failed to start because pq.dll was not found. 
Re-installing this application may fix this problem.

Checking the Cygwin site shows that this refers to a dll that installs 
with postgreSQL. Since it could be useful to have postgreSQL installed 
for GRASS anyway, I installed it and re-ran GRASS and NVIZ.

It then said it couldn't find cygcrypt-0.dll. It turns out that this is 
from "crypt", an encryption package for Cygwin. I installed it and 
re-ran GRASS and NVIZ.

THEN is couldn't find tcl84.dll. I checked on the Cygwin site once 
again and found that this is indeed a dll for the Cygwin installation 
of TclTk. It is the version of TclTk that we are NOT supposed to 
install because WinGRASS will not work with it (a version of TclTk 8.3 
that does work with GRASS is provided on the WinGRASS site).

At this point, I decided to stop and contact the list. Apparently, 
whoever compiled this version of GRASS may have installed everything 
(?) from Cygwin and somehow linked it to the GRASS compilation.

The best thing seems to be to recompile 5.0.3 correctly without all the 
dependencies, and repost it. I mainly work on a Mac and don't (yet?) 
have the ability to compile for Cygwin from source. Hopefully someone 
with Windows and a PC can do this. Thanks much.

Michael Barton

_____________________________
C. Michael Barton, Professor & Curator
Department of Anthropology
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ  85287-2402

Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671




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