November 14, 2019

Getting started with the Grass GIS

I can start grass from the command line via "grass76", but this is unfortunate and likely to change as new versions come out. My system pulldown offers a way to start it under "Education". I downloaded their North Carolina sample dataset (145M) as nc_spm_08_grass7.tar.gz.

They recommend creating a directory like "grassdata" in your home directory. I will put this on a different large disk as /u1/Grassdata. Once this is done, you create projects as "locations" within that directory.

I untar the sample data into /u1/Grassdata and it becomes /u1/Grassdata/nc_spm_08_grass7. Then when I "browse" to /u1/Grassdata, it discovers this location and offers to let me start a Grass session on it. This launches two GUI, a layer manager and a map display. But I get errors like: 

(wxgui.py:17015): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 18:18:04.821: gtk_box_gadget_distribute: assertion 'size >= 0' failed in GtkScrollbar
And I get nothing of use in the displays. I try "grass76 -tcltk" based on some stuff on the website, but this yields all manner of error messages. I can type "grass76 -text" and get a command prompt from grass, but this looks like something you would need to be an expert to do anything with.

Move on to version 7.8

I get the same error. Maybe I should try QGIS instead of Grass.

Later for Grass

It is old, funky, and it doesn't work.

We have indeed moved on to using QGIS, which is fantastic.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's GIS pages / tom@mmto.org