[GRASS-user] Introduction and installing GRASS

[David Colyer]

Hello GRASS users

As I’m new to GRASS and new to this list, allow me to introduce myself.
I’m a part-time GIS post-grad student in Aotearoa / New Zealand. 

GRASS doesn’t seem to be widely used in this country. If there’s anyone
from NZ on this list I’d love to hear from them. University courses are
based around ARC, although some opensource programmes were used in my
last course.

One of my main interests in GIS is exploring the potential of GIS for
community groups, NGOs and activist groups. This inevitably leads using
open source software like GRASS.

I’m planning to blog about my experiences, first installing and learning
to use GRASS and other opensource and free to use software, and then
exploring how these might be useful for community groups. I hope that
this record of my experiences might be useful to others starting out
using opensource GIS. 

I’d also be happy to contribute to the GDP - GRASS Documentation
Project. My own experiences as someone completely new to GRASS could
feed in to the tutorial and help pages. And I could also help with
“reading existing doc in order to weed out completely outdated stuff”.

But first I need to install GRASS on my laptop. And that’s where I’ve
encountered my first problem! I hope someone on this list can help.

I’m using a Presario CQ64, which has an Athlon 64 processor (which could
be part of the problem). The current OS is Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick
Meerkat.

I’ve followed the instructions on the Ubuntugis page. According to the
Ubuntu Software Centre, GRASS is installed, and files are indeed present
on my HD. I just can’t find a way to open the programme!

[I should say that I’m also very new to Linux.] I expected there to be a
GRASS icon that I click to open it, but can’t find anything like that.
Do I have to use command line? Or has something gone wrong?

Any help appreciated.


Cheers

David

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