[GRASS-user] launching a gui

[Moritz Lennert]

On 14/04/09 21:18, Chris Heys wrote:
> At Moritz's suggestion I have downloaded ncurses - indeed, the full 
> Utils package - from Cygwin.
> And the two error messages, of which I was complaining, have disappeared.
>  
> MORITZ IS A GENIUS

No, I was just the one who answered... :-)

>  
> But, gis.m still does not work.
> It looks as though the default Cygwin download, which is not a full 
> download, is not enough.

Did you follow the instructions here:
http://grass.osgeo.org/grass62/binary/mswindows/
and here:
http://geni.ath.cx/grass.html#_Binary_distribution_for_Cygwin_Deprecated_by_MS-Windows_native_binary
?

> I was hoping to use Cygwin because most of the online tutorials assume a 
> Unix environment.

I don't think that the Unix environment is so much of an issue, but 
rather the use of the command line. For an introduction to the GUI, you 
should start by reading [1] and [2]. You can also try some of the 
tutorial listed on the OSGEO education material website [3].


> Some of the tutorials are themselves tar.gz files.
> And Marcus's book is quite expensive.
> I don't want to buy the book unless the Cygwin/Grass combination works.
> So I have started using the native Windows version of Grass, at first 
> with the Spearfish60 data.
> And I have made some progress.
> But 'd.vect roads' does not change what I see on the screen.
> It creates a file called 'map.png'.

Yes, the command line d.* commands used in the tutorials all suppose the 
existance of X-monitors. These do not work on Windows, however, (and do 
not exist in grass7 anymore, BTW) and all display has to either through 
the GUI (either tcltk-based or the new wxpython-based) or directly into 
a file (actually the GUI also just displays the content of files).

If you want to follow the tutorial from the command line, you should 
find a viewer which will automatically update a file which has changed. 
You can then point it to map.png and just leave it open while you 
experiment with the d.* commands. You will probably have to set the 
environment variable GRASS_PNG_READ=TRUE, so that each d.* command 
doesn't erase the results of the previous one. I personnally use gqview 
for which there is a Win port [4], but there's tons of others.

You can also try the internal ximgview [5], but I don't know if this 
works in the windows version, nor if it is included in any of the 6* 
binaries.


Moritz

[1] http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/gis.m.html
[2] http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/wxGUI.html
[3] http://www.osgeo.org/educational_content (or still a bit more 
complete old version: 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Educational_Content_Inventory)
[4] http://gqview-win.sourceforge.net/
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/2008-October/040589.html