[GRASS-dev] MS-Windows native GRASS

[Moritz Lennert]

Huidae Cho wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 11:10:46AM +0200, Moritz Lennert wrote:
>> On Thu, September 14, 2006 05:56, Huidae Cho wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm so excited to announce that I've just uploaded a package for
>>> MS-Windows native GRASS at http://geni.ath.cx/grass.html .  Rather than
>>> putting everything required for winGRASS in one huge package, I have
>>> prepared
>>> a batch file for automatic installation except for MinGW, MSys, and
>>> PostgreSQL, which are distributed as *.exe.  I hope it will make easy for
>>> anyone to install winGRASS.
>> Congratulations ! At first try, install didn't work (nothing installed
>> even though it said it did). I then realised that the wget package was not
>> downloaded correctly. After I downloaded it again, everything went very
>> smoothly.
>>
>>> Please note that this first package is considered incomplete and
>>> requires more testing and bug fixing.
>> First impressions:
>>
>> - had to add c:\mingw\bin in the PATH line of grass.bat, otherwise it
>> wouldn't find wish84
>>
> 
> Did you try to run c:\msys\1.0\msys.bat and check if PATH includes
> /mingw/bin?  /mingw/bin should be there by default.  I think you
> installed MSys before MinGW so that MSys does not know about MinGW.
> This is why I emphasized installation order.



I think I know what might have happened: I probably mistyped the mingw
installation path, giving c:\mingw instead of c:/mingw. Could this be it
? I don't know where to change this in an existing installation, though.

Just redid the install in a windows instance running in qemu on my
computer (this way I don't have to bother my colleagues anymore) and now
it works without changing the path.


Other remarks:

- both the postgresql and the wget links do not work for me. For both I
ahve to go up one level and looking for the files myself.

- grass starts with a warning: "Invalid database." This is not very 
encouraging for a new user ;-) But the biggest problem is that trying to 
navigate to a GRASS database which is outside the msys tree (e.g. 
//Documents and Settings/moritz) gives me a 'no such file or directory' 
error. If I replace the original '/' in the database navigation text 
field by c:, then I can navigate to the database without any problems.

- gdal_translate (gdal-bin) is not installed and so you cannot export a 
map to jpg or other format

- grass opens in the msys home directory. It might be interesting to 
allow the user to choose in which directory it starts as user would 
probably prefer to be able to stay withing their usual windows directory 
structure

- ps.map (simple tests) works great, printing display to eps works 
great, however, cannot create postscript or PDF output, since GRASS 
doesn't find ghostscript in its path (it is installed in
Program Files/gs/...). Not sure where to include this path ?

- typing exit at the command line, does not close tcltk windows

More testing to come, but now I have to get back to work ;-)

Moritz