[GRASS-user] New User

[Thomas D. Dean]

I am a new user, just discovered grass and OSGeo. My current interest is
accessing the files from NaturalEarthData, converting them into matlab
format, and, using octave to manipulate and/or plot.

I use Linux and Unix. Octave 3.4.0, Gnuplot, Grass 6.4.0.  This
workstation has Ubuntu 10.04.

I downloaded the 10m-admin-0-countries.zip   and
10m-admin-0-boundary-lines-land.zip files from NaturalEarthData.

I want to use grass to display some portion of the data.

Then, use r.out.mat to generate a octave compatible binary file.

I started looking at the manual, but, quickly became confused.

Is there a simple how to for what I want to do?

tomdean