Starlink Software Collection - Download and Install 2015A

2015A release notes

Two distributions of the 2015A release of the Starlink Software Collection are available:

To check the MD5 checksum of your downloaded file, run either the md5sum, md5, or md5deep command, depending on which you have installed.

The above Linux distribution is built on glibc 2.12. Older versions of glibc might not work and are currently not supported. To check your glibc version, type "rpm -qi glibc" on RedHat-related distributions.

Parties interested in releases for other platforms (i.e. Solaris) can email <scicom AT SPAMFREE eao DOT hawaii DOT edu>. Please note that the East Asian Observatory only runs Linux operationally and can only devote time and resources to Linux builds; all others (including those not listed here) are supported on a best-efforts basis.

Installation instructions

Linux

The tar file will unzip into a star-2015A/ directory in the directory where you downloaded the tar file. This release can be placed anywhere. When using the software, set the STARLINK_DIR environment variable to the location of the star-2015A/ directory, i.e. if you had unzipped it into a /home/person/software directory, then the STARLINK_DIR environment variable would be set to /home/person/software/star-2015A.

On some systems you may need the libg2c.so library. On Fedora Core (and presumably all Red Hat-derivative systems) this can be found in the compat-gcc-32 RPM. On Ubuntu (and presumably all Debian-derivative systems) this can be found in the libg2c0 package.

The 64-bit release requires glibc 2.12 and fairly recent versions of the X11 libraries. Up-to-date CentOS and Fedora Core 6 are distributions that are known to work. We welcome reports of successful installation on other distributions.

OS X

1) Relocate the star-2015A to the root directory.

The tar file will unzip into a star-2015A directory in the directory where you downloaded the tar file.

This star-2015A directory must be moved to the root directory of your computer to work!

To do this, go into the directory where you downloaded the tar file and run the following command:

sudo mv star-2015A / 

2) An up-to-date XQuartz X11 distribution must be installed.

If you already have XQuartz installed, run the application (which is installed like a normal application) and go to the top menu and select: X11->Check for X11 updates.

If you need to install the software, it can be found here: <http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing>.

3) GFortran

A Gfortran library is needed. The HPC version was used for our build, and we recommend using this. To get this library, download and install HPC gfortran <http://hpc.sourceforge.net/>. Please follow the installation instructions at that site. You will need to go to the command line to unpack the software into root. (your browser may offer to unpack the software for you, but it is unlikely to install it into root correctly)

After installing this, please check that you have a libgfortran.dylib in /usr/local/lib .

MOUNTAIN LION USERS: there are currently two different versions of gfortran on this HPC site which you can install. The Mavericks build depends on the Mavericks/Mountain Lion gfortran Version 4.8 from that site. If you install the Mountain Lion/Lion gfortran Version 4.7 you will need to install the Lion version of Starlink.

4) Libjpeg.

We have a dependency on libjpeg, and the libjpeg.dylib will need to be present in /usr/local/lib/ on your computer to use starlink. If this has already been installed on your computer by another package manager software, you could copy the libjpeg.dylib files to /usr/local/lib/ manually.

Otherwise, you can install to this location using homebrew <http://brew.sh> (a mac package manager). If you have installed homebrew, the commandline command to install libjpeg is:

brew install libjpeg

Post-installation Run-up

Before you can run the Starlink Software Collection, you need to run our setup scripts. This will have to be done every time you open a new terminal, before you can run any Starlink commands.

If you're terminal is running bash or other sh-like shell (this is the usual default on modern Linux distributions and Mac OS X) please type the following commands into your terminal:

export STARLINK_DIR=/star-2015A

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/profile

On Linux, if you have installed your star-2015A somewhere other than into the root directory (/) you would instead set the first command to point to the location of the installed star-2014/ directory.

e.g., if you had put it in your home directory, you would type:

export STARLINK_DIR=/home/MyUserName/star-2015A

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/profile

Some astronomy departments still set up their computers to use tcsh as the default shell instead of bash. The setup process is similar, but the commands are slightly different. If you have installed star-2015A into the root directory, you will need to type the following commands into your terminal:

setenv STARLINK_DIR /star-2015A

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/login

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/cshrc

And again, similar to the BASH shell instructions above, if you have installed star-2015A into a different directory you will have to give the path to that directory in your first command (and still run the following two commands) e.g.:

setenv STARLINK_DIR /home/MyUserName/star-2015A

You can now run Starlink commands within your current terminal. For most command line packages, typing the name of a package will tell you that it has been loaded, and tell you what command to run to find out more about the package. For example, try typing:

kappa

into your terminal.

Some starlink software also launches a graphical interface. If you type:

gaia &

into your terminal, the Gaia data visualisation software will launch and you can load in astronomy maps and cubes to view (both .sdf and .fits formats are supported.)

Any time you wish to start using Starlink Software in a new terminal, you will need to run the appropriate 2 or 3 commands above again. For convenience, you could save these commands into an alias.

IMPORTANT NOTE (for Linux only in this release): the setup scripts put the 'Starlink' version of various libraries into your LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. Unfortunately, this means that after sourcing the Starlink setup scripts, other command line programs (such as e.g. CASA) may not work inside the terminal in which you sourced Starlink. To get around this, simply:

  1. Don't source the Starlink scripts by default (e.g. don't put the commands into your .bashrc, .profile, .login or .cshrc files), but instead source them manually every time you're running Starlink software.

  2. Run other software (such as CASA) in a different terminal from the one in which you are running Starlink.

ORAC-DR for WFCAM

Because of the large size of WFCAM calibration files, they have been split off from the main download tarballs, as not everybody will be reducing WFCAM data using ORAC-DR. These calibrations can be downloaded here (901MB .tar.gz). The tar file will unzip into a wfcam/ directory in the directory you downloaded the tar file to. To install these calibration files, copy the directory into the $STARLINK_DIR/bin/oracdr/cal/ directory, thus creating the $STARLINK_DIR/bin/oracdr/cal/wfcam/ directory containing the calibration files.

This file has not changed for the 2015A release, so if you downloaded it for intervening releases after the lehuakona release, you need not download it again.