Introduction

GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is a free, open source Geographical Information System (GIS) capable of handling raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphic data.

GRASS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Visit the GRASS GIS main web site at http://grass.osgeo.org/

Release Notes

WinGRASS is a GRASS Development Team project, with the goal of creating a Microsoft Windows native binary port of GRASS.

WinGRASS is an experimental project, still at an alpha stage, and it can't be considered a complete and fully working release of GRASS for Windows. Some features are missing (see Missing Modules section in this document), some known bugs still need to be fixed (see Known Issues section) and other features may not work.

If you need a robust, bug-free release of GRASS on Windows you should install the Cygwin version of GRASS 6.3.0, available at http://grass.osgeo.org/grass63/binary/mswindows/cygwin/.

See also http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WinGRASS_Current_Status.

The current release of WinGRASS, based on GRASS 6.3.0, has been built on Windows Vista in the MinGW environment and contains parts of the following open source (GPL compliant) softwares and libraries:

MSYS (1.0.11)

Flex (2.5.4a-1)

Bison (2.1)

Zlib (1.2.3)

Libjpeg (6b)

Libpng (1.2.29)

Libtiff (3.8.2) *

Freetype (2.3.5)

FFTW (3.1.2)

PDCurses (3.3)

PROJ.4 (4.6.0)

GEOS (3.0.0)

GSL (1.11)

Expat (2.0.1)

PostgreSQL (8.3.1)

SQLite (3.5.9)

GDAL (1.5.2) **

Tcl/Tk (8.5.2)

AVCE00 (2.0.0)

E00compr (1.0.0)

GPSBabel (1.3.5)

* with Libjpeg support enabled

** with GEOS, Expat, PostgreSQL and SQLite support enabled

The current package contains a complete build (libraries and executables) of all the items listed above, except for PostgreSQL, for which the package provides only the main dynamic library.

All the above softwares and libraries have been built from sources with the exception of:

MSYS: provided by the MinGW Project on SourceForge.NET (http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml);

Flex and Bison: provided by the GnuWin32 Project on SourceForge.NET (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/);

GPSBabel: provided by the GPSBabel Project (http://www.gpsbabel.org//).

The current release of GRASS has been built with the following configuration:

  NVIZ:                       yes
  BLAS support:               no
  C++ support:                yes
  DWG support:                no
  FFMPEG support:             no
  FFTW support:               yes
  FreeType support:           yes
  GDAL support:               yes
  GLw support:                no
  JPEG support:               yes
  LAPACK support:             no
  Large File Support (LFS):   yes
  Motif support:              no
  MySQL support:              no
  NLS support:                no
  ODBC support:               no
  OGR support:                yes
  OpenGL support:             yes
  PNG support:                yes
  PostgreSQL support:         yes
  Python support:             no
  Readline support:           no
  SQLite support:             yes
  Tcl/Tk support:             yes
  wxWidgets support:          no
  TIFF support:               yes
  X11 support:                no
  MacOSX application:         no

Binary Release History

WinGRASS 6.3.0-1

First binary release of GRASS 6.3.0 for MS Windows native

WinGRASS 6.3.0-2

Fixed the bug #143 [WinGRASS Installer fails retrieving the user name on some XP versions]

WinGRASS 6.3.0-3

Fixed the bug #160 [WinGRASS: v.report incompatability issue] Improved the installer adding the feature of automatically recognize if and what release of GRASS is already installed on the system

WinGRASS 6.3.0-4

Switched from the Windows XP based build environment to Windows Vista Fixed the bug #189 [WinGRASS installer can not find NC sampledata] Added the Libjpeg (6b) library Added the JPEG support in Libtiff Added the JPEG support in GRASS Libpng upgraded from (1.2.24) to (1.2.29) GSL upgraded from (1.9) to (1.11) PostgreSQL upgraded from (8.2.6) to (8.3.1) SQLite updated from (3.5.6) to (3.5.9) GDAL upgraded from (1.5.1) to (1.5.2) Tcl upgraded from (8.5.1) to (8.5.2) Tk upgraded from (8.5.1) to (8.5.2) Added AVCE00 (2.0.0) [avcexport.exe and avcimport.exe] Added E00compr (1.0.0) [e00conv.exe] Added GPSBabel (1.3.5) [gpsbabel.exe] Redisegned the sample data download section of the installer Improved the installer structure with the ability of automatically perform upgrade, downgrade or repair installations

Install GRASS

To install GRASS launch WinGRASS-6.3.0-4-Setup.exe and follow the instructions in it.

If installed into a directory that has spaces in either its name or the path of directories leading up to it, some functionalities of GRASS might be hampered. We would highly appreciate if you tried and reported any problems, so that we can fix them. However, if you want to avoid any such issues, we recommend that you choose a simple installation path without spaces, such as C:\GRASS.

The WinGRASS Installer has been made using the OpenSource NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) software, available at: http://nsis.sourceforge.net

Launching GRASS

There are three options for launching GRASS, described as follows referring to the GRASS Start Group menu:

Click on this icon (in the GRASS Start Group or on the Desktop) to launch GRASS with the standard Tcl/Tk GUI.

Click on this icon to launch GRASS in text mode on the Windows command line.

Click on this icon to open the GRASS MSYS console, that will let you work within a unix/linux-like shell environment.

Sample Data

As install option, you can also download and install the following GRASS sample data sets:

North Carolina Data Set

Used as sample data in the book "Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach", 3rd edition, this data set is a comprehensive collection of raster, vector and imagery data covering parts of North Carolina (NC), USA (map), prepared from public data sources provided by the North Carolina state and local government agencies and Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF). See also http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php

South Dakota Data Set

Also known as Spearfish data set, it contains raster, vector and point data of South Dakota, USA (UTM projection, Clarke66 ellipsoid, NAD27 conus) See also http://grass.osgeo.org/download/data6.php

The sample data files will be installed into a directory called GIS DataBase, that will be created in your Documents folder.

Uninstall GRASS

To uninstall GRASS click on this icon in the GRASS Start Group menu and follow the instructions in it.

New GRASS Python GUI

We would highly appreciate if you also tested the new GRASS Python GUI.

To do that you'll need to download and install the following additional third-party software components:

Download the Python installer

Install to %PROGRAMFILES%\Python

Add %PROGRAMFILES%\Python to your PATH system variable.

Download the Python Extensions installer

Just launch the installer, it will automatically set the correct install path.

Download the wxPython installer (Win32 Unicode)

Install to %PROGRAMFILES%\Python\Lib\site-packages

Download the NumPy installer

Install to %PROGRAMFILES%\Python

Finally, to start GRASS with the new Python GUI, open the GRASS MSYS console, type grass63 -wxpython and then enter.

Please, note that the new GRASS Python GUI is still at a highly experimental stage, and that the vector digitizer is disabled in it.

See also http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WxPython-based_GUI_for_GRASS

Missing Modules

The following modules are missing in the current WinGRASS release:

r.li.daemon

r.li.edgedensity

r.li.patchdensity

r.li.patchnum

r.li.shape

r.li.simpson

r.li.shannon

r.li.mps

r.li.mpa

r.li.padcv

r.li.padsd

r.li.padrange

r.li.cwed

r.li.richness

r.li.dominance

Known Issues

See http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/WinGRASS_Current_Status#Known_Issues

How to Submit Bugs

We would highly appreciate if you contributed to WinGRASS project by submitting bugs to http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ or informing us about them through the Windows GRASS Mailing List (http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-windows).

Build GRASS From Source

The smartest and easiest way to build GRASS from source is to use the GRASS MSYS Environment: it contains all the files needed to build GRASS as Windows native binary application in the MinGW environment.

Download the MSYS installer

Install to c:\msys

At the command prompt question for post install, type n and then enter.

Download the MSYS coreutils package (required by some GRASS modules and scripts):

Download the MSYS coreutils package

Unpack it to a temporary folder, then copy all the content of the coreutils-5.97 folder to c:\msys (overwrite the existing files when asked)

Download the MinGW installer

Select "Download and Install Current Version";

Install only "g++ compiler" and "MinGW Make";

Install to c:\msys\mingw

Download the GRASS MSYS Environment

Unpack it to c:\msys\local

Build GRASS referring to this section of the GRASS Windows Native Binary Building Guide

Information on how to build your own GRASS MSYS environment on Windows are available at http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/BuildingOnWindows

GRASS Development Team

The GRASS Development Team is a multi-national group consisting of scientists and developers participating from various fields.

For more information, see http://grass.osgeo.org/community/team.php

Credits and Contacts

WinGRASS project has been created and is currently developed by the GRASS Development Team.

The WinGRASS self-contained binary package (including all the builds and the installer script) is provided by Marco Pasetti.

This document has been written by Marco Pasetti, in agreement with the GRASS Development Team.

To contact them, e-mail to: GRASS Development Mailing List (http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev).