GRASS Basics - Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools - page 294

The entire process of creating a location was done from a shell ses-
sion because we started GRASS without any command-line switches.
GRASS also provides a GUI start-up using grass62 -gui . Let's look at one
more way to create a location, using information from one of our layers
and the GRASS GUI.
Start GRASS using grass62 -gui . On some platforms you can get the same
effect by double-clicking the GRASS desktop icon or selecting it from
your application menu. Once the GUI starts, we are presented with a
form that allows us to start working right away, create a new mapset, or
create a new location. In Figure C.6 , on the following page, we see that
the location we created using the command line shows up by default
and is ready to use. Our interest is in creating a new location, using
the Georeferenced File button found under the “Define a new location
with...” heading.
When you click the button to create a location from a georeferenced file,
a small dialog box opens where you can specify the name for the new
location, the path (by default this is your current GRASS database loca-
tion), and importantly, the file to be used in creating the location. Using
the browse button, we can browse to the location of our world_borders
shapefile and use it to create the location. Once we have the path for it
filled in, we click the Define Location button.
That's all there is to it. GRASS creates the new location and tells you it
needs to restart in order to work with the new location. After it closes,
start up the GRASS GUI again, and you will find the newly created
location ready for use—with one exception. There are no mapsets yet,
other than the PERMANENT mapset. The PERMANENT mapset is for shared
layers. We need to create a mapset for us to use for loading our data
and eventually doing some editing. From the GUI, it's easy to create a
mapset by selecting the location you want to add it to and then filling
in a name for the mapset. Click the Create New Mapset button, and
it's done. You can now select it from the list and click the Enter GRASS
button to continue. This brings up the grass shell, and it also starts the
GRASS display manager. For now, just exit GRASS, unless you want to
play around with your new mapset and do some exploration.
In this section, we saw how several ways to create a new location. We
didn't look at them all but just enough to get us started. The GRASS
GUI also provides the ability to create a location using an EPSG code
or by entering projection values. Of all the methods available to us,
using QGIS and the Georeferenced File method in the GRASS GUI are