The GRASS Development Team announces:
GRASS GIS 5.0.0pre2 released 13 September 2001

The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS GIS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) used for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modelling, and visualization of many types of data. It is free software released unter GNU General Public GPL (GNU General Public License).

Platforms supported by GRASS:
Linux, Sun Solaris, Sun Solaris/Intel, Silicon Graphics Irix, HP-UX, DEC-Alpha, PowerPC, MacOS X, AIX, BSD, CRAY and other UNIX compliant platforms (32/64bit), experimentally Windows NT/2000 running Cygnus

Where to get the new release:
http://grass.itc.it
http://www.baylor.edu/grass/
and on the mirrors (Australia (local only) | Belgium | Croatia | Italy | Japan | Germany | Poland | Slovakia | South Korea | Taiwan | Thailand)

The new source code is available, selected binaries will be build the next days.

The general focus of this release is stability and reliability beside improving the functionality. Proposed major changes in vector and attribute management are scheduled for GRASS 5.1.

For details on GRASS software capabilities please refer to: http://grass.itc.it/general.html
The full ChangeLog is also available.

What's new in GRASS 5.0.0pre2:

• Details: please read NEWS
• 30 GIS modules fixed or updated/added
• improved module documentation
• Source Code improvements (excerpt only):
• improved the new library "gmath": wrapper to support LAPACK/BLAS
  routines, centralized more numerical functions here
• NVIZ: ability to support 3D hardware accelerated video cards
• Xdriver improved
• portability improved

GRASS Upgrade NOTE: In case you upgrade from GRASSbeta1..beta11, you have to convert the floating point raster data. Due to a copyright violation we had to change the internal raster compression format. Luckily the tool "r.lzw2z" exists which allows to automatically convert a complete location. Find more information here!. If you face a raster map reading problem in GRASS 5.0.0pre2, you have to update the floating point raster maps with "r.lzw2z".
Again: this change is only needed if you upgrade from GRASSbeta1..beta11 to the current version. GRASS 4.x data can be read directly, consider to run "r.support" and v.support".

We hope you enjoy the ongoing development.

In case you are interested to join the developers team, and/or share algorithm or
ideas with the GRASS community, don't hesitate to contact us!
http://grass.itc.it/grassdevel.html
http://www.baylor.edu/~grass/grassdevel.html
 

On behalf of the GRASS Development Team

Markus Neteler