Intro to GRASS workshop
Introduction to GRASS GIS
This document was first written to accompany a workshop to be given at Carleton University on 17 October, 2011, in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies' main GIS lab (Loeb A200). Anyone is welcome to adapt it for other purposes, or to help improve and keep this tutorial up to date (see CC license conditions at bottom left of page).
Getting Started
If GRASS is not already installed on a machine for you, getting the software is probably your first step. This workshop will use the OSGEO Live project's bootable test environment, version 5.0, to showcase up to date versions of all of the software without requiring any changes to the machine it is running on. The Live DVD should already be booted for you when you arrive at the workshop, and you are welcome to take the disc with you when you leave. The software running when you boot the disc is based on an Ubuntu Linux distribution. The disc also contains installers for GRASS (and other software) for Windows and Mac OS environments.
Other ways to get GRASS:
- Download binaries: 6.4.2 snapshot full installer or 6.4.2 snapshot (64bit) installer or 6.4.1. installer
- Download source code: 6.4.2svn from SVN for your own compilation + and Install instructions
In the OSGEO Live environment, launch GRASS by going to the Geospatial menu icon near the top left of the screen, then choose the Desktop GIS sub-menu, then choose GRASS GIS. This will launch a shell script terminal and a graphical interface to choose your GRASS database, location and mapset. These concepts tend to confuse new users, but once you understand the logic used here, file maintenance is taken care of for you to a large degree.
The GRASS project has a good introduction to this opening screen on its website, so to avoid reinventing the wheel, please on this link to bring up the relevant web page. We'll go through this material step by step in the workshop. If you are using this tutorial outside of the interactive workshop, you should be able to piece together the material by reading the full web page online.
