[GRASSLIST:5427] Re: Newbie tries OS X port

[Niwa Concept - Oriental Gardens]

Le samedi, 1 fév 2003, à 00:08 Europe/Paris, Glynn Clements a écrit :

>
> Marvin Humphrey wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> AFAICT, the problem is that MacOS X isn't quite as Unix-like as some
> people seem to claim.
>

Yes it is a Unix like, it is a FreeBSD Kernel. But all the X11 specific 
components are not installed because by default Mac OS X doesn't use 
X11 but its own window manager, Quartz Extreme. You need to add it and 
its libraries.
Grass need a bit of unix knowledge to be installed freely without 
buying the CD on OpenOSX.com

> Basically, GRASS runs on Unix and Unix-like[1] systems. Getting it to
> work on MacOS X basically comes down to getting MacOS X to behave in a
> sufficiently Unix-like manner.
>
> [1] e.g. Cygwin and, with some tweaking, MacOS X.
>
>> 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.
>
> Warning: Tcl/Tk supports three distinct platforms: Unix/X11, Windows,
> and Mac. The tcltkgrass interface *might* work with the Mac version,
> but NVIZ definitely needs a Unix/X11 version of Tcl/Tk. It also needs
> a Unix/X11 version of OpenGL.

I think Mesa hasn't been installed. You need to compile it, I have a 
version if you want.

>
>> -- 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
>
> Or add /usr/local/bin to PATH; there are more possible ways to do this
> than I can go into here.
>
>> -- 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.)
>
>> From the various reports that I've seen, I suspect that using xterm
> will cause far fewer problems than the Mac's native Terminal program.

For me, it works in both xterm and terminal.

>
>> -- 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.)
>
> The only file which has a hardcoded path is the "grass5" script
> itself:
>
> 	# Set the GISBASE variable
> 	GISBASE=/opt/grass5
> 	export GISBASE
>
> You can put the rest of GRASS wherever you like, so long as you change
> that line in the grass5 script.

Yes you can. For me Grass is in /Applications.

>
>> -- 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.
>
> This sounds like a Mac Tcl/Tk thing.

Yes the TCL/TK for jaguar wasn't supported before this patch because it 
was recent.

>
>> 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?
>
> AFAICT, everyone who is using GRASS on OS X *isn't* a developer.;
> that's most of the problem. I suspect that we could fix most of the
> problems, if we knew *exactly* what the problems were.

You may need to install a lot of other libraries to get it to work as 
explained at the end of the Mac OS page.

>
>>  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"
>
> Did you need to use --with-tiff-libs=... when configuring? Is
> libtiff.dylib in a "standard" directory? (On Unix, this would be /lib
> or /usr/lib, but (AFAIK) MacOS X decided to be different).
>

I think libjpeg wasn't installed.

> If libtiff.dylib exists but is in a non-standard location, workarounds
> include creating a symlink or copying the library, or setting an
> appropriate environment variable (on Solaris and Linux, it's
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH; I have a vague recollection that MacOS X uses DYLD_*
> instead, although I could be misremembering).
>
>> -- when I try to run r.in.gdal, the terminal returns "r.in.gdal: 
>> Command not found."
>
> By default, r.in.gdal tries to load the GDAL library dynamically (like
> a "plug-in"). I suspect that this doesn't work on a Mac; using the
> --with-gdal configure switch may fix this.
>

The same, I think Gdal is not installed. The problem is that I can't 
compile neither 1.1.7 neither 1.1.8. If somebody could help me...

>> -- 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.
>
> The one factor which seems to bite people when importing rasters is
> that, by default, the map is positioned at the origin (i.e. (0,0)) in
> the projection's coordinate system, which results in it being far
> outside of the current region (use r.info and g.region to confirm
> this). You can use r.region or r.support to position the raster (you
> need to know the bounds of the raster; this information *isn't* stored
> in the DEM).
>
>> -- 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.
>
> r.proj doesn't appear to be available via tcltkgrass.
>
> I don't think that there's formal documentation; however, you can
> examine the tcltkgrass/module directory (e.g.
> /usr/local/grass5/tcltkgrass/module) to see which modules are
> available, and you can search the tcltkgrass/main/menu.tcl script to
> find out what the menu item is called.

r.proj is not available in the GUI. :-(
Anyhow, it is available via the command line.

>
>> -- 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.
>
> If all you want to do is create maps, GMT[2] might be a better option.
> GRASS is primarily an analysis package, whereas GMT is oriented
> towards creating maps.
>
> [2] http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/
>

It is also maybe because FFTW and netpbm are missing.

>> 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?
>
> I suspect that most of your problems relate to MacOS X, although the
> import issue (import/draw produces a blank screen) is a common newbie
> problem.
>
> The other issue is that tcltkgrass is simple GUI front-end that was
> created as an afterthought. The "real" UI is the command line
> interface.
>

I think you should purchase the CD at www.openosx.org because all is 
already set up to work, you have nothing to do. There's also a book on 
this site which explain how to use Grass.

> -- 
> Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>

A. Gillaizeau.