Spatio-temporal analysis with GRASS GIS

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education

The Netherlands

Outline

Installation steps

System requirements

This training is tailor made for Windows 10 and all other common Linux dsitributions. In WIndows 10, "Bash for windows" utility will be used to run GRASS GIS and bash commands. If you are using Linux you can skip to the section on installing GRASS GIS.

Windows 10

First step is to set up "Bash for Windows" in your computer.

Go to the Start menu and search for PowerShell. Run it as administrator

Open 'Windows Powershell' as administrator

Type in the following command.


# Right click on Mouse to paste the below command in powershell (some times double right click)
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

You’ll be asked to confirm your choice. Type Y and press enter:

Paste the command and press enter in keyboard

Restart the computer

Second step is to install a linux system in your Windows 10.

Go to the Windows Store and search for “Linux”.
Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (It will take some time depending on the internet connection)

Open Microsoft store

Search for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Third

Go to programs and search for Ubuntu, open the Ubuntu bash
Set up a username and password as instructed in the bash command line

Create username in Linux

Forth

Install MobaXterm software for gui support in Ubuntu bash from this link

Open MobaXterm and click on Ubuntu on the left panel to start Ubuntu linux commandline (bash) as shown in the screenshot below.

MobaXterm with Ubuntu Linux open (Highlighted where you should double click to open Ubuntu)

Now the Linux environment is ready.
The MobaXterm with Ubuntu session opened, is going to be your processing environment for this training.

Install GRASS GIS

Next step is to install the latest version (grass78) of GRASS GIS in your Linux machine (either in Windows 10 or Linux OS). Following commands will install the GRASS GIS in your Linux machine.

	
# Run the following commands to install gdal, proj, grass gis etc.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grass grass-gui grass-core grass-doc grass-dev

Some Linux commands to start with:

In this section, let us see some of the Linux commands which are handy in all kind of command line scripting.

One of the major difference in Linux is that the backslash (/) is used for folder/file paths, while in Windows it is forward slash (\).

Access your folders and files in command line

In the Ubuntu system installed in Windows 10 (WSL) all your drives can be accessed at /mnt
In the code snippet below, some of the very common commands are explained with comments.

	
# In a bash code snippet any line starting with a # is a comment
# To navigate to a certain directory the following command - cd (change directory) is used.
# cd /path/to/folder
# To move to the home directory
cd
# press enter
# To move to /mnt
cd /mnt
# To list (ls) all the drives connected in mnt
ls
# press enter (you are in /mnt now)
# To move to drive D:
cd d
# To list all the folders in your drive d (where you are now)
ls
# press enter
# List using Regular expressions (regex)
# Move inside a folder and list a particular type of files - ".txt"
ls *.txt
# List all the files starting with training*
ls training*
# List all the files starting with training and end with ".txt"
ls training*.txt
# To know which directory you are in (present working directory)
pwd
# press enter

More tips on regular expressions here: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/pattern-matching-bash

Check this link to learn more about copy, move and delete files in Linux command line: https://ftp.kh.edu.tw/Linux/Redhat/en_6.2/doc/gsg/s1-managing-working-with-files.htm

Last changed: 2021-07-07

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License - Thanks to Vaclav Petras for the style.