[winGRASS] newbie question: XFree86 and GRASS

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Alex.

I have CC'ed the Grass list as there are more experienced users available
there who may have other insights into the problem.  My guess is that we
need to make a new distribution - see further below.

Markus - seeing Alex's problem, we probably need to make a new Win32 distro,
based on the changes which came about a few weeks ago in Cygwin to do with
directory path names.  I will try to make available a fairly complete build
with the native XDriver (rather than the X Windows version which I am no
longer set up to build) for you to download today or tomorrow.

> having trouble getting GRASS to run.  When attempting
> to run the GRASS Seeds tutorial, GRASS starts up OK,
> but when I type g.list, and then 1, in order to look
> at the raster files, I get the following message:
>
> "grass5.0.0pre2_i686-pc-cygwin_bin.tar.gz" may be a
> binary file.  See it anyway?

This is strange - "g.list" is supposed to look only in the directories of
the current project, giving a list of the files in the category which you
chose - in your case it should have shown a list of raster files, rather
than asking if you wanted to view
"grass5.0.0pre2_i686-pc-cygwin_bin.tar.gz".

>
> Not too surprisingly, if I type 'y', I get a page of
> gibberish.  I'm not sure whether this is a problem
> with the way I have GRASS set up, a problem with
> the files (my first effort to remedie this was:
> tar xzf grass5.0.0pre2_i686-pc-cygwin_bin.tar.gz,
> which seemed to create a lot of new files/directories,
> but did not fix the problem), or a problem with
> XFree86.  I suspect that it may be a problem with
> XFree86, since I have also been unable to use it to
> run graphical programs when I try to use it to telnet
> to a remote Unix machine.  On the other hand, it is
> entirely possible that more than one problem is going
> on.

Sounds like your installation has gone wrong - possibly at the Cygwin stage
or the scripts are not settiung the appropriate environment variables.

>
> Has anyone seen anything like this before?  Any
> insights?

My feeling is that because the distribution binary file you used was made
before the recent changes in Cygwin which affect directory path names, that
your installation has gone wrong.

Check whether that file is in the CELL subdirectory of the grassseeds
tutorial.

If you reply to this email, try including a listing of your environment
inside a running Grass session.  That is, send a copy of the output from the
"env" command at the Grass command prompt.

Also try the "less" command to see that it works OK.

>
> I am relatively new to Unix in general, and so I would
> not be surprised if I have overlooked something in the
> setup.  Also, if there is any chance that I could get
> feedback this weekend, that would be extremely cool,
> since I am going to be talking to some fellow grad
> students about GRASS on Monday morning, and I think
> I'd have more to say if I had a little bit of
> experience playing with it, as opposed to just
> reading.

Grass is very good if you like Unix command line interfaces. It has some
interesting simulation packages built in.  The Windows version is very new
(not so new that the problems you have related above would appear though!)

The short answer is that I enjoy using Grass.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.