Is anyone running OpenGrADS in Windows? I’m trying to run it on Windows 11. I’ve read several posts on OpenGrADS pertaining to Linux but not Windows specifically. I ran GrADS on Linux (CentOS) about 12 years ago when I worked at NASA but I my sysadmin installed it, and I just ran it in the GUI. So, before I converted an old laptop to Linux for running OpenGrADS, I thought I’d try on my Windows machine because the Windows instructions state:
[i]Installing the Windows version of GrADS is very easy. If you downloaded a file called
grads-2.0.x-win32_superpack.exe
simply run it, answer a few simple questions, and you are good to go (the installer will also automatically set your PATH so that you can run GrADS from the command line window).[/i]
When I click the OpenGrads icon on my desktop (the target location is C:\OpenGrADS-2.2\Contents\Cygwin\Versions\2.2.1.oga.1\i686\opengrads.exe), the command prompt opens as shown in the attachment and when I press enter for landscape mode, it returns “GC Package Initialization: Size = 11 8.5” and then the command prompt window closes.
The documentation links for Windows at opengrads.org (OpenGrADS - Manual) go to a 404 file not found error or the wiki for an older version from 2018 that just lists dozens of irrelevant websites. The SourceForge help for GrADS Windows was last updated in 2015 for a Windows 8 question.
I’d appreciate any help/suggestions, including skipping the Windows version if Linux seems like a better solution. And if Linux is the way to go, what’s the best version of Linux to install, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS?
Thanks for the reply and pointing me to that thread. I looked through all ten pages but I didn’t see any posts describing my issue in which GrADS won’t even start. If I ever get GrADS to start, some of those posts with scripts will be helpful. Maybe my issue is Windows 11 - I might try my older laptop running Windows 10 and see what happens.
I can confirm that I have OpenGrads 2.2.1 running on Windows 11. I tested it last night after another user PM’d me about problems they were having running it. Their problem doesn’t seem to be the same as yours though.
Unfortunately I don’t recall how I installed OG but I’ll see if I can find any clues when I’m back in my laptop.
Just one quick thought. I run it from within a CMD window rather than launching it from a Windows icon. There’s a more recent thread that I started to support an OG script producing charts from GFS data… that has some .gs files attached and also a couple of .bat files to run the scripts with the correct parameters entered. Those might be a good place to start experimenting with running in command mode.
Thanks for the reply. I tried starting from the command prompt and it returns the error “Error in GXSTRT: Unable to connect to X server”. Supposedly, there is no need to install X Windows separately since the instructions (http://wiki.opengrads.org/index.php?title=Installing_GrADS_v2.0_on_Microsoft_Windows) state “The Xming server is currently bundled with the Win32 Superpack.”
The instructions also say that “When WiFi is turned OFF you get Error in GXSTRT: Unable to connect to X server”. My computer is connected via Ethernet cable, so I wouldn’t think not having Wi-Fi on is an issue. The solution they state is to "Open Device Manager and choose “Add legacy hardware” from the “Action” menu, but in Windows 11, the only item under “Action” is “Help”.
This is just waffle with the thought that something might make sense when you read it!
I just looked at my downloads and what I have is grads-2.2.1.oga.1-win32_superpack.exe. Your instructions talk about installing a v2.0 file but you seem to have v2.2 installed which is odd. My downloaded installation filename has ‘oga’ in it and again your instructions don’t include that but your path suggests that you have the oga version installed, which also seems odd. Anyway, you seem to have the right version installed.
Whilst investigating I looked in the directory that contains my OpenGrads scripts and typed ‘grads’ to see what happened. I got some odd errors that didn’t make sense until
I read the errors properly. The install includes a set of vbs files including opengrads.vbs and I suspect that they run in preference to executables in the path. If I run opengrads.exe from the command line then I start to get the prompts I expect to see. Your icon launches opengrads.exe but I wonder if when you launched it from command line did you just enter ‘opengrads’ or opengrads.exe?
It also says on launch…
Starting X server under C:\OPENGR~1.2\Contents\Resources\Xming
Starting OPENGR~1 under C:\OPENGR~1.2\Contents\Cygwin\Versions\221OGA~1.1\i686 ...
…so I’m not seeing your GXSTRT error.
If I hit return to the landscape question I get
GX Package Initialization: Size = 11 8.5
Command line history in \Users\/.grads.log
ga->
I also get an empty (black) window popping up titled ‘GrADS 2.2.2.oga.1’ so I’m guessing that’s the ‘X-Window’ (or equivalent) that OpenGrads will output to?
One final thought…if I run my .bat files for manual or auto running my Grads script for chart generation I don’t get the line
Starting X server under C:\OPENGR~1.2\Contents\Resources\Xming
which suggests that the ‘-lcbx’ command line switches prevent the X-Window component from being run. A bit of experimentation shows that ‘opengrads.exe -b’ makes it run in batch mode which doesn’t load X-Windows…so try that to see if you avoid the error. I don’t understand why you get the error but I don’t.
I’ve tried to start OpenGrADS with and without the .exe extension (see attached screen capture) and the result is the same error: Error in GXSTRT: Unable to connect to X server.
If I enter “grads” at the C:/OpenGrADS-2.2 directory, it tries to open the grads.vbs file and it returns an error on line 44 (objShell.Run ExecutableFullName & args) in the VBS script.
If you’ve not already seen them, check out the old Nordic scripts that I updated - Creating GFS maps using OpenGrads They still work (I tested them a couple of days ago).
