[GRASS-dev] GRASS & cygwin quite slow

[Moritz Lennert]

Hello,

(Please tell me if I should take this over to the grass-win list.)

After quite a long time of lobbying and a first presentation, my 
department here at the university is seriously thinking of moving 
towards GRASS, both for teaching and for research.

Now, several colleagues working in a MS Win environment would like to 
try GRASS. However, after having installed the Cygwin+GRASS combination 
(using the grass-cvs package from http://geni.ath.cx/grass.html) for 
several colleagues, I have noticed that GRASS is quite slow, at least 
diplaying vector maps. If I can't get this to speed up, it will be an 
immediate showstopper for most of my colleagues.

I know I could tell them to use QGIS, but currently, the capacities of 
QGIS in terms of vector mapping (which is what most of my colleagues do 
- currently mostly with ArcView) are just too limited compared to GRASS.
The other option is obviously to wait for the new GRASS python 
interface. But as the dynamic is launched now, I would hate to tell 
people: GRASS is great, just wait a bit.

So: is the cygwin solution slow because of the cygwin layer in between ? 
Because of the X-server ? What might be a solution to speed things up ?

Moritz