[GRASSLIST:886] RE: GRASS on Mac OS X

[NICHOLAS D CAHILL]

I'm no pro at grass, but I've used & installed it a number of 
times with OS X and Apple's X11, without going through all 
the fussing with environment variables. Have you tried 
starting GRASS in text-only mode. At the prompt (e.g. "nick%") 
type "grass5 -text"  This will put you in text-only mode. You 
have to do this to create a new location, I believe. Type the 
name of the location you want to create, and if it doesn't 
already exist, grass will create it. Then you can quit grass and 
start again in GUI mode: "grass5 -tcltk" I believe.

The g.region dialog being larger than your screen is a bitch; 
I've had it on my powerbook as well. Try hitting the green 
maximize button at the top of the window; this will squish the 
window down so it fits your monitor, although then the lines 
may be too small to type in. But if you are going to do a lot of 
work in grass, you'll be happier if you get a larger monitor. 

Another option, which I like, is to use afterstep (binary 
available free on the web at afterstep.org, I believe). This is an 
alternative x-window manager, which by default gives you 
something like 4 or 6 virtual screens: when you move the 
mouse to the bottom of the screen, you pop into another 
screen, with the lower part of your g.region window on it. But 
you have to kill the quartz-wm process, and then start 
afterstep:

ps -aux | grep quartz

returns

nick   933   0.0  0.3    80816   1560  ??  S    10:24PM   0:00.16 
quartz-wm
nick  1029   0.0  0.1     1416    308 std  S+   10:33PM   
0:00.00 grep quartz

where 933 is the process running the quartz window manager 
(quartz-wm)

then 

kill -9 933; afterstep&

will kill the quartz window manager and start the afterstep 
window manager. But this is not for everybody. The bigger 
monitor is really the better solution.

Nick Cahill