November 14, 2019

Installing Grass GIS

Grass is available as RPM packages for Fedora 30, so installing it could hardly be easier: Typing "grep grass dnf.list" shows me: 
grass.i686                                                             7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
grass.x86_64                                                           7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
grass-devel.i686                                                       7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
grass-devel.x86_64                                                     7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
grass-gui.x86_64                                                       7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
grass-libs.i686                                                        7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
grass-libs.x86_64                                                      7.6.0-4.fc30                                               fedora
qgis-grass.i686                                                        3.4.6-1.fc30                                               updates
qgis-grass.x86_64                                                      3.4.6-1.fc30                                               updates
So to install it, I do: 
su
dnf install grass grass-gui qgis-grass
This does not install the "devel" and "libs" package -- probably these are only necessary if I want to do some hacking on grass. I am by no means clear on what the "gui" and "qgis" packages are all about.

My system pulldown menu now has "Grass GIS 7" under "Education" in the pull down menu. Also /bin/grass76 now exists (and is a Python script) and starts Grass in the same way.

The Grass home page indicates that Grass is now up to 7.8, while Fedora is only shipping 7.6 for whatever reason.

Install version 7.8 in a new and different way

The 7.6 version that is part of the standard fedora package set just does not seem to work. So I am going to uninstall it, then install 7.8 from something called "copr" (cool other projects repository). 
su
dnf erase grass
This takes grass, grass-gui, and qgis-grass and we can start clean. It also gets rid of a bunch of python 2 packages. Now to install the latest thing from copr: 
su
dnf copr enable neteler/grass78
dnf update
dnf install grass grass-libs grass-gui
dnf install grass-devel
I get a warning about this not being "regular Fedora stuff" and it installs a bunch of python3 packages.

One nice thing already is that /bin/grass is a link to /bin/grass78

However, this fails in the same way as version 7.6

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's GIS pages / tom@mmto.org