I have ported the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) package from Unix to OS/2. GMT is a freeware package that produces exceptionally high-quality graphical output; it has been developed by Paul Wessel, currently at the University of Hawaii, and Walter Smith, presently at NOAA. GMT is especially designed for spatial data, and includes ways of displaying information using any one of many map projections. All GMT graphical output is postscript, and can be printed on any postscript printer, or printed with a utility such as Ghostscript. For more details on GMT, refer to the GMT Web Site, which also provides some examples of GMT graphical output.
This version of GMT for OS/2 has only been tested on Warp 3. No testing has been performed on OS/2 version 2.x or on Warp 4, though I expect that these routines, which make no use of PM or the WPS, should work fine on such systems.
The present OS/2 version of GMT is REQUIRED to be installed upon a disk formated for HPFS. It might work with file systems such as the native file system used by Linux (which can be read by OS/2 with the appropriate IFS driver), but has not been tested using such a file system. In the future, an effort will be made to modify GMT to permit it to be used on FAT file systems.
In addition to the GMT codes, one must also have installed the run-time support for EMX. This plus the remainder of the EMX development system is freely available from Hobbes or one of its mirror sites (e.g., the Walnut Creek ftp site). The OS/2 version of GMT has been compiled with EMX version 0.9c (fix level 2), and thus the run-time library corresponding to that version should be used. In addition, GMT requires the netCDF libraries, developed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. These are freely available from its ftp site, but an OS/2 version is provided with this GMT distribution. Finally, the present version of GMT has only been developed using HPFS; it has not been tested under FAT file systems and many of its routines will not work on a FAT file system.
Note that netCDF support is not required to be installed if one only plans to use the GMT executables. Installation of netCDF is necessary, though, for any recompilation of the GMT routines.
The environment variables GMTDIR and GMTLIBDIR need to be set for GMT to work properly under OS/2; these variables MUST BE SET IN CONFIG.SYS if CMD.EXE is used for a command interpreter.
GMTDIR should be set to the fully-qualified name of the directory where GMT's default settings are kept. Under Unix, such settings are typically kept in a user's home directory, but there is no corresponding home directory under OS/2, which is a single-user system. For example, if one wanted the default GMT data to be kept in the \gmt directory on drive D:, one would
GMTLIBDIR should be set to the fully-qualified name of the directory where the data files used by GMT (such as world coastline files) are kept. For example, if GMT's data files are on the D: drive in directory \gmt\data, then one would
Note the use of forward slashes for both the environmental variables above!
If a shell other than CMD.EXE is used, these environmental variables probably need only be set in the shell's initialization file. For example, if the TC-shell (a shell closely resembling the Unix C-shell) is used, then the environment variables have to be set in that shell, which is typically done by setting the variables in the .tcshrc or the .cshrc file.
The OS/2 distribution of GMT is provided as 3 ZIP archives. These are
gmt_os2.zip: Contains source, executables, and documentation for GMT
netcdf_2.zip: Contains source, executables, and documentation for netCDF.
gmtdata.zip: Contains data files used by GMT. Note: GMT is distributed with several resolutions of coastline, political boundary, and riverfiles. gmtdata.zip only includes the crude-, low-, and intermediate resolution data files. The "high" and "full" resolution data files can be obtained using information found on the GMT web site. These data files can be quite large and are rarely used.
To install GMT, simply go to a directory above which you want the GMT codes placed and unzip the file gmt_os2.zip. Doing this will create a directory structure as follows:
gmt
|
|
|--------bin
|
|--------doc
|
|--------lib
|
|--------man
| |
| |--------manl
|
|--------src
|
|--------libm
The GMT executables are all in the gmt/bin directory.
Documentation for the routines that comprise GMT is found in the gmt/doc subdirectory. For each routine, there is a Unix man page describing how to use the routine. In fact, there are three versions of these man pages. These are
In addition, there is a quick-reference document and a GMT Tutorial and Cookbook. The latter provides a number of examples of how to use GMT. Both of these documents are provided as Postscript files.
Please note that the man pages are all contained in a ZIP archive called manpages.zip. Users can extract the relevant man pages from this file.
In addition, thereThis version of GMT is not directly supported by Paul Wessel and Walter Smith, who are the authors of the Unix verison. If you believe you've found a bug, it may be a bug that applies to the Unix version as well as to the OS/2 versions. Be aware that there are two electronic mailing lists available to users. The first, gmtgroup@soest.hawaii.edu, is used primarily to notify users of bug fixes and new versions. The second, gmthelp@soest.hawaii.edu, serves as a users forum for idea exchange and questions about GMT usage. To subscribe to either of these lists, send an e-mail message to listserver@soest.hawaii.edu containing one or both of the commands
subscribe gmtgroup <your full name, not your e-mail address> subscribe gmthelp <your full name, not your e-mail address>
Do not include the angle brackets in the message. Also, if your e-mail client appends a signature file to your outgoing messages, inhibit the sending of the file (or send a blank file).
For questions of bug reports that you believe are specific to the OS/2 version, please send bug reports [e-mail only!] to Allen Cogbill, Los Alamos National Laboratory.