[winGRASS] Newbie checks in (again)

[John Robertson]

In an earlier post,
http://grass.itc.it/pipermail/wingrass/2005-March/000729.html
I told about some webpages I'd put up, hopefully to be of help to green as 
grass newbies like myself, if they are having trouble getting a good 
install of WinGRASS.

After I tried a time or two to install WinGRASS with fully functioning 
helpfiles (using IE), I took the pages down, and later put them back up (by 
request) with the statement that they no longer worked for me.    At this 
period, they were of usefulness to at least one person who simply wanted to 
know how to remove GRASS from his computer.

I've not lost interest (or determination) in getting GRASS to work for me, 
but life intervened, I purchased Global Mapper, and got out (just after the 
last minute) maps for some (modestly) paying customers.  My first ever Rev 
War map using GIS generated base map, mostly streams less man-made lakes, 
can be seen here
http://southerncampaign.org/newsletter/v2n3.pdf
page 9.  Requires Reader 5 or later.
I've created over 50 such maps for publication and it has been a pain 
hand-tracing all those rivers.   The version used in this .pdf was sent to 
publisher as a .jpg with 150dpi, attached to an email. In Reader, it can be 
zoomed up to 400% with acceptable quality.   I later sent him one on a cd 
for print publishing  in a .tif at 300dpi.  Since this map 1 of 1, I have 
learned how to sharpen the resolution of the stream lines so they will be 
even more narrow.  This was what I'd hoped to be able to do in GRASS (and 
eventually will!).

Anyway, I've put out that fire and have returned to efforts to get a clean 
install of WinGRASS, which worked without a hitch.

For those who need them, these pages have been revised a bit, to reflect 
what I have found to work in installing WinGRASS 6.0.
http://jrshelby.com/grass/index.htm
Thru step 7 and the very beginning of step 8 on the website of Huidae Cho, 
I follow his procedure faithfully and add what I have found to be keypoints 
in not messing up.  If you've been there before, it is a good idea to hit 
reload/refresh to be sure you are actually seeing the new versions rather 
than those cached by your browser.

Rather than use his creation of "NewLocation" in order to be able to enter 
GRASS, I have opted to go ahead and create .../database subdirectory and 
install the Spearfish data which will serve the same purpose, will get the 
data into the .../database subdir (which I found no other way to create), 
and will provide a green-as-grass newbie such as myself  with the 
pre-installed data expected in several available tutorials.

I found that having some data already installed relieved my frustration by 
giving me something I could use as soon as I got WinGRASS up and running.

John Robertson