[GRASS-user] "Error setting region" on Grass startup

[Hamish]

brendon wolff-piggott wrote:
> I have installed Grass 6.3 on Ubuntu 8.04  from deb
> http://les-ejk.cz/ubuntu/ hardy multiverse. Every time I
> start Grass and select a location and mapset I get  "error setting
> region" and "child process exited abnormally".
> 
> >From googling around this seems to have to do with Gdal not being
> installed.  So I did "sudo apt-get install gdal-bin", based on
> http://www.perrygeo.net/wordpress/?p=119.

right.
 
> I still have the same problem in Grass and no plain gdal
> executable in usr/bin (gdalinfo, gdal_translate, gdalwarp etc).

what does "g.region -p" from the GRASS terminal prompt say?
what does "dpkg -l | grep gdal" say?

> Should I uninstall Grass and reinstall, or do I need
> another version of gdal??

You need the version of GDAL that your grass binaries were built with/for.
you can tell that with ldd, try this from the GRASS terminal prompt:
  ldd $GISBASE/lib/libgrass_vect.so | grep gdal


Hamish