[Live-demo] Following the install_grass.sh script in ubuntu

[Hamish]

vega_l wrote:
> I hope someone could give me a hand, I've been trying
> to follow the install_grass.sh script to install the last
> version of GRASS in Ubuntu Jaunty (amd64) - GNOME.
> 
> I'm not familiar with this kind of sintaxis but I think
> I got everything right, except for this last part of the
> script:
> 
> if [ `grep -c 'GRASS_PAGER=' "$USER_HOME/.bashrc"` -eq 0 ] ; then
>    cat << EOF >> "$USER_HOME/.bashrc"
>
> GRASS_PAGER=more
> GRASS_ADDON_PATH=~/grassdata/addons
> export GRASS_PAGER GRASS_ADDON_PATH
> 
> EOF
> fi

so that tests if GRASS_PAGER is already there in the .bashrc file.
If it isn't, it writes the lines between the "EOF"s to the end of the
.bashrc file.

for meaning of the environment variables see this help page:
  http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/html64_user/variables.html

 
> How can I add manually the changes required into my .bashrc file,

just add 
 GRASS_PAGER=more
 GRASS_ADDON_PATH=~/grassdata/addons
 export GRASS_PAGER GRASS_ADDON_PATH

to the end of .bashrc, and 'mkdir -p ~/grassdata/addons'
"export" makes them propagate to any children processes launched from
that bash. see the grass wiki for a listing of the 100+ available
addon modules.


(Personally I put GRASS_PAGER in ~/.grass.bashrc to keep my .bashrc less
cluttered, but whatever. The Addon path needs to be available to the GUI
so it needs to be set before launching it, ie really in ~/.bashrc)


> and what does the grasspager=more do?

tells it to use `more` instead of `1ess` or `cat` when a shell listing
will scroll off the screen. Debian's policy is to default to `less`,
which is a little inappropriate in this context, so I reset it back
to the upstream default.


> PD: about the install_qgis.sh script
> 
> QGIS worked great in the virtual machine, so I followed
> that script too to install QGIS into my main
>  system. 
> Ultimately, I could do it, but I got problems with the
> libqt4-sql-psql package. It depends on libqtcore4 version
> 4.5.0 and I had installed the 4.5.1 , so I had to uninstall
> every other program that was depending on the new version in
> order to downgrade it, and one of them was precisely
> VirtualBox.

I'm not sure how well we can support systems with custom changes away
from the stock distribution.
You may have to ask the UbuntuGIS team about this one.
It is not too hard to rebuild packages from deb-src yourself with
"debuild"; there are plenty of tutorials for that available on th web.


Hamish