[GRASS-user] (not) getting started

[Markus Neteler]

Wim,

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 10:13 PM, Wim de Vries <wsvries at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am new to GRASS. Having a hard time to understand/get GRASS working
> (v.5 on suse 10.3 as well as v.6.2 on debian lenny).

GRASS 5 is, uhm, fairly old.. also 6.2 dates back to

> Isn't there a simple way e.g. to load arc e00 data and convert it to png.

This requires a few (!) steps but is feasible - we'll guide you through.

> I came to the point of defining a new location, but then the list for
> projections does not show Lambert conformal or mercator.

It should do so (Lambert conformal is LCC for example). But see below:

> Next, I cannot
> get out of the list. Had to hit CTRL-C to completely drop out of the app.
> In other words each simple step takes me hours.

The GRASS team has meanwhile done the homework and implemented
a nice "location wizard" in the latest GRASS 6.4:

http://grass.osgeo.org/screenshots/gui.php#wxpython
-> "Location wizard" (3 screenshots)

This makes creation of a location quite easy.
Any GDAL/OGR supported file format is accepted which
should include E00 (note that there are some specialties
with E00 sometimes but maybe you are lucky).

So please consider to get the recent version which is available as
release candidate 3 (pretty stable). I know that it is packaged for
Ubuntu privately, in Debian it is in sid, in Mandriva in Cooker etc:
http://grass.osgeo.org/download/index.php#g64x

> The tutorials only
> concentrate on doing sth. with an existing project, without telling what
> the steps really do or mean.
> If someone knows a good book on a recent version, I would certainly buy
> it, for I think it is a great tool once you understand it...

Shameless plug: See http://www.grassbook.org/  :-)

Hope this helps
Markus