Some preliminary notes on building GRASS for Mac OS X - at the moment, just some notes collected from helpful volunteers.

• Notes from Hamish re: compiling GRASS 5.7 follow, below...
• William Kyngesburye has provided a page of < a href="http://webpages.charter.net/kyngchaos/macosx/grassinstall.html">notes re: GRASS5.3 on OS X - June 2004 those notes have been recently updated and provide a comprehensive description to download and install "manually" all of GRASS's prerequisites as well as GRASS itself.

  
  Here a some of my notes which may be useful for your write-up.
  This is for a binary only install.
  
  
  GRASS 5.7 on OSX 10.3
  
  
  1) Install Apple's X11 and friends
  Our new system came with OSX 10.3 preinstalled, and past the point of custom
  install so I had to download Apple's X11 from their website[1]. After 
  installing that, I headed over to Applications/Installers/Developer Tools
  and double clicked Developer.mpkg; from the custom install list I 
  choose Devel Tools Software, MacOSX SDK, BSD SDK, and X11 SDK. 
  
  2) Setup a root password
  Open Apps/Utilities/Terminal and type 'sudo su' and set a strong password.
  
  3) Install R-statistics[2]
  This is optional, but useful for geostats. Click on CRAN, choose a mirror,
  click on R Binaries, macosx, and download RAqua.dmg. Double click on that 
  package and install tcltk, libreadline, and finally RAqua. This installs 
  the OSX port of R to Applications/StartR. I made a link to this application
  so I could start R from the command line by typing "R":
  (as root)
  mkdir /usr/local/bin  (if it doesn't already exist)
  ln -s /Applications/StartR.app/Contents/MacOS/StartR /usr/local/bin/R
  
  Next, start R and type:
  install.packages("akima")
  install.packages("VR")
  install.packages("GRASS")
  install.packages("RODBC")
  install.packages("grasper")
  install.packages("mgcv")
  install.packages("shapefiles")
  .. and any other packages that might look interesting to you
  
  The GRASS website has a useful R primer[3].
  
  
  4) Setup X startup files.
  OSX's Terminal looks for .bash_profile but not .bashrc. Apple's X11 looks for
  .bashrc but not .bash_profile. Solution (kludge) follows:
  
  .bash_profile:
  . ~/.bashrc    # does this need to be a hard path for the GRASS init script?
  
  .bashrc:
  alias rm='rm -i'
  alias cp='cp -i'
  alias mv='mv -i'
  alias ls='ls -FG'
  alias ll='ls -la'
  alias la='ls -A'
  alias dir='/bin/ls'
  PATH="$PATH":/usr/local/bin
  
  I also disabled the xterm& in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.
  
  5) Install Fink[4]
  Download & run the Fink Installer. Double click on "Fink 0.6.2 Installer.pkg"
  and after that is setup, drag the FinkCommander folder to your desktop.
  Check this line has been added to all users' .bashrc:
  . /sw/bin/init.sh
  I ran 'fink configure' to setup which Fink mirror to talk to, but that's not
  a strict requirement.
  May need to log out & back in to take effect.
  
  6) Run FinkCommander
  Setup to use stable packages, it has already guessed to use the 10.3 branch.
  This branch is missing some packages as of this writing, but saves time vs.
  compiles. I installed: wget, gimp, dlcompat-shlibs (needed for Gimp), 
  tcklk (yes, again), and gmt. I would have installed nedit and octave if they
  were in the stable archive at the time in binary form. Gimp brings down a lot
  of goodies like the netpbm tools and libpng which will probably be needed
  later. Someone noted about needing the TclTk from unstable for compile??
  
  
  7) Install PROJ.4 and GDAL
  Download[5] and follow Markus's instructions to install PROJ and GDAL.
  Then as root, make the following two links:
  ln -s /sw/lib/libgdal.1.1.9.dylib /usr/local/lib/libgdal.1.1.dylib
  Forget what the second one was, thought it for Proj. What breaks?
  
  These are probably better dealt with by getting /sw/lib added to OSX's 
  ld path, where ever that lives.
  
  
  8) Install GRASS
  Download[5] and follow Markus's instructions. I found it better to use 
  wget instead of Safari to do the download to keep the MD5 hash the same
  as Safari automatically unpacks the archive.
  (as root)
   grass57-20_11_2003-powerpc-apple-darwin6.8-install.sh \
      grass57-20_11_2003-powerpc-apple-darwin6.8-bin.tar.gz \
      /usr/local/grass57
  
  mkdir ~/grassdata
   and install the Spearfish, Leics, and Radim's g51test data sets there.
  
  
  9) Add links to the X11 menu
  Start X11 (Apps/Utilities), choose Customize.. from the Applications menu.
  Add Item, Add Item. Double click on blanks & fill in:
  Name       Command
  GRASS 5.7  xterm -geometry 123x25+5+400 -e grass57
  The GIMP   gimp
  
  
  10) Enjoy. Everything seems to work, even NVIZ.
  
  
  [1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/x11/download/
  [2] http://www.r-project.org/
  [3] http://grass.ibiblio.org/statsgrass/grass_geostats.html
  [4] http://fink.sourceforge.net/
  [5] http://mpa.itc.it/markus/grass57/macosx/  [TEMPORARY]
  
  Hamish