[GRASS-dev] please help review osgeo live dvd summary docs

[Helena Mitasova]

Hamish,

the quickstart looks very nice and I did not find any major problems (but other may have a look too)

I just have couple comments:

- given that OSgeo live will be mostly used by new users should you even mention
the tcltk interface? It sounds a little bit confusing for people who don't know what TclTk is 
and makes GRASS look overly complex. Instead, it would be useful to put here a link to 
the wxPython GUI Help page so that people know where to find explanation of what you 
are talking about later on (especially what each button on the layer manager means 
- the verbal description may not be clear enough for some users).

Also, the note about the netbook use probably cannot be avoided at this time but in future 
releases should we just redesign the big image on top of startup screen into something 
smaller to avoid this problem?

Note that for shaded relief (and watersheds ?) there is a button in the GUI that is turned on
and will add the resulting map to the layer manager automatically so you don't need to add
it, although I am not sure this is set as a default on the live DVD version.

As for the legend and scale - we often have trouble moving around the legend
with mouse after moving around the scale - even if I click on
the legend the mouse still picks up the scale - there is a way around it but it can be 
frustrating for the first time users. It may be safer to position the legend first and 
the scale second but even that may be tricky. This may be the case only for mac users
(or perhaps windows) so it may work properly on Live DVD under linux.

For the vector material, I don't have anything for spearfish, but you can find some examples that produce
nice maps for nc data set using d.vect.thematic at the end og this page (including the GUI instrcutions)
http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea582/common/GIS_anal_grass/GIS_Anal_grvisual.html

and then some database stuff here (not really cleaned up)
http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea792/common/Assign_GISamodel/Vect_GISamodel.html

Helena

P.S. We have had discussion already, but talking about scale would it be possible to
 change meters to m for the scale in future releases -
it looks funny written in full given that kilometers are km (and it also makes scale too long). 
Given that mi should be used for miles
(see wiki - the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses and recommends mi),
there shouldn't be any confusion that m is meters.


Helena Mitasova
Associate Professor
Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
2800 Faucette Drive, Rm. 1125 Jordan Hall
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
hmitaso at ncsu.edu

"All electronic mail messages in connection with State business which are sent to or received by this account are subject to the NC Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties.” 

On Jul 22, 2012, at 8:32 PM, Hamish wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> we're finalizing the next version of the OSGeo live sampler DVD,
> USB stick, and Virtual Machine release. It's a live boot system
> with all the latest goodies, including GRASS 6.4.2 and almost
> all of the OSGeo family of desktop and server apps.
> ( http://live.osgeo.org )
> 
> It would be really helpful if others with fresh eyes could have
> a look over the grass pages and double check that they're all
> still relevant for v6.4.2, no dumb mistakes, you like what you
> see, etc.
> 
>  http://adhoc.osgeo.osuosl.org/livedvd/docs/en/overview/grass_overview.html
> 
>  http://adhoc.osgeo.osuosl.org/livedvd/docs/en/quickstart/grass_quickstart.html
> 
> The finalized English version will go out for translation at the
> end of this week. (conspicuously there are no Italian translations
> yet even though there is a strong Italian FOSS4G presence, hint
> hint :)
> 
> There's a copy of the quickstart in the GRASS wiki. Note that
> when I wrote it there was a GRASS workshop at the targeted FOSS4G
> conference which was going to focus on vector processing, so I
> didn't bother to put much of that in the quickstart. Contributions
> demonstrating some fancy vector usage that makes GRASS special,
> or a common vector task to show how GRASS does it easily, would
> be appreciated. Just note that the quickstarts are intended to be
> quick- i.e. 5-10 minutes worth, so we've got to keep it concise.
> 
> 
> In addition, on the disc the QGIS-GRASS bridge is broken because
> of this bug:
>  http://hub.qgis.org/issues/2947
>  https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/868
> 
> (QGIS doesn't take into account GRASS's mapset ownership rules,
> so the plugin fails in a multi-user environment)
> 
> 
> thanks for any assistance,
> Hamish
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