[GRASSLIST:5424] Newbie tries OS X port

[Marvin Humphrey]

Greetings,

I spent several hours yesterday trying to install and configure GRASS 
for OS X Jaguar (10.2.3), and I'm starting to wonder if I haven't 
bitten off more than I can chew.  At every step of the way, there seem 
to be bugs and tweaky interfaces requiring very precise maneuvering.  
If I had more experience with unix, I think I would be in better shape 
-- the bulk of my experience is with classic Mac.  I'm used to 
troubleshooting (I was in prepress for two years, and I've done beta 
testing for CD burning software), but maybe GRASS is just not at a 
stage where someone of my level of experience can come in and use it 
efficiently?  I'm not a professional cartographer or programmer, I'm a 
print designer and audio engineer who's making a career move to web 
design.

So far, I've...

-- Installed the Apple distribution of X11.  It's officially a public 
beta, but the OpenOSX folks seem to think it's alright.
-- Installed a more recent version of TCLTK than comes from the GRASS 
download page.  I got the 8.4.1 version from Apple, figuring that was 
the most reliable source for current OS X compatibility.
-- Installed the GRASS binary and applied the patch for TCLTK, though I 
haven't yet applied the patch for NVIZ.
-- Installed the Spearfish and g51test-9 sample datasets.
-- Found that typing 'grass5' to start the program doesn't work, even 
after running the suggested script.  Discovered the workaround of 
typing this instead: sh /usr/local/bin/grass5
-- Figured out how to launch grass from X11's Xterm, rather than 
Terminal, allowing me not only to start GRASS, but also to start the 
monitors.  (I figured this out by making a connection between the word 
xterm in the error messages and the fact that I'd seen that word when 
launching X11.  Yes, I'm inexperienced.)
-- Discovered that installing GRASS anywhere other than /usr/local/ 
causes GRASS to not find required files.  (And therefore, uninstalled 
and reinstalled where GRASS wanted to go.)
-- Solved the missing OSX-BG.gif problem by making my own gif and 
putting it in the right directory.
-- Solved the "window name 'frameosx_BG' already exists in parent" 
problem by installing a patch from OpenOSX, posted two days ago.  This 
was dicey, but they seemed to be using the same components I'd 
installed, so I tried it and the problem did go away.
-- Figured out how to move the drop TCLTK down menu list from behind 
the Mac OS header bar, by changing the location of the Dock. (a minor 
issue)
-- Started to grok the GUI, including activating and selecting monitors 
before doing anything else.

At this point, I can launch GRASS and its GUI, and keep playing around 
without having it crash too often.  But now that I'm getting into the 
nitty gritty of the program I am finding out that the debugging and 
configuration-massaging may be far from over.  The startup bugs that 
I've experienced, I've found documented in both the archives of this 
listserv and the bug/wish list, so I'm not alone... but who is using 
the GRASS OS X port who isn't a developer?  The "window name 
'frameosx_BG' already exists in parent" problem seems like a fatal 
flaw, at least for anyone who wanted to use the GUI, and the patch just 
came online a couple days ago!  Anyway, now I've got a new list of 
unresolved issues...

-- using r.in.tiff, I get the error message "dyld: r.in.tiff can't open 
library: libtiff.dylib  (No such file or directory, errno = 2) 
Trace/BPT trap"
-- when I try to run r.in.gdal, the terminal returns "r.in.gdal: 
Command not found."
-- using r.in.bin from the GUI, I can't quite manage to get some 
GTOPO30 data to load. I've gradually begun to figure out what numbers 
need to go where, and I finally saw it take a while to chew and watched 
the percentages slowly rise... but it still generated a blank file. 
This is presumably a user issue, but the interface isn't too much help 
for me as I attempt to escape my ignorance.
-- um, is there a list anywhere of which modules actually are available 
for the GUI?  Eventually, I need to use r.proj.  I can't find it there 
yet, but the names don't correspond.  I suppose I could launch every 
one to see what it does, and check out the man pages, but it would be 
neat if that documentation existed somewhere already.
-- I frequently get a Wish lockup when selecting a monitor.

Ultimately, I plan to make a few hundred maps for a client's website.  
Maybe 3-10 for each US state, and a similar number for European 
countries.  I'll be augmenting these in Photoshop and Illustrator.  I'm 
planning on using the GTOPO30 dataset, but it needs to be reprojected.  
The purchase of GeoCart is hard to justify for this limited use, 
especially since the Mapthematics website doesn't even mention OS X at 
all.

These are all simple starter issues, too -- I'm just trying to get 
tiffs into this program!  Once I solve them, am I going to find that 
all the processing modules present similar challenges?  I've made some 
pretty sketchy systems work in my day, but I've got to ask... is this 
going to be worth it?  I had thought that if I learned the basics of 
GRASS, I could get this project done, and I might find the familiarity 
gleaned from it of use in the future.  But now I'm thinking that the 
initial learning curve may be too steep, what with the bugs and the 
quirky interface catering to the power user over the newbie.  Comments?

-- Marvin Humphrey
CD Design Website - http://marvin.mrtoads.com