Starlink Software Collection — Download and Install 2023A

2023A release notes

The following distributions of the 2023A 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.

For Linux you can also try installing using Flatpak.

Installation instructions

The tar file will unzip into a star-2023A/ 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-2023A/ 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-2023A.

macOS

There may be non-trusted developer warnings on macOS Catalina (10.15) and later. In this case you can try removing the com.apple.quarantine attribute as follows:

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine star-2023A

macOS Requirements

  1. An up-to-date XQuartz X11 distribution must be installed. If you already have XQuartz installed but need to update it, you can run the 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.

  2. A recent Java JDK must be installed to use the StarJava programs such as topcat, splat stilts and frog. This can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html. To check if you have Java installed already, open a terminal, type java -version and see if the command is found, and if you have 1.8 installed. There should not be any other dependencies for installing the macOS build.

Known issues on macOS builds

X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for
operation)
  Major opcode of failed request:  45 (X_OpenFont)
  Value in failed request:  0x60015d
  Serial number of failed request:  1743
  Current serial number in output stream:  1744

This seems to be caused by some problem in the interaction between Tk and unicode font handling in XQuartz. If you see this error, it can usually be resolved by starting gaia with an option that prevents the use of unicode characters: 

% gaia -unicoderadec 0

This error will also make it hard to launch ORAC-DR with the interactive display, we recommend using a -nodisplay option if you have to run gaia with the -unicoderadec 0 flag

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 your terminal is running bash or other sh-like shell (this is the usual default on modern Linux distributions and macOS) please type the following commands into your terminal

export STARLINK_DIR=/star-2023A

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/profile

If you have installed your star-2023A somewhere other than into the root directory (/) you would instead set the first command to point to the location of the installed star-2023A/ directory.

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

export STARLINK_DIR=/home/MyUserName/star-2023A

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-2023A into the root directory, you will need to type the following commands into your terminal:

setenv STARLINK_DIR /star-2023A

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/cshrc

source $STARLINK_DIR/etc/login

And again, similar to the bash shell instructions above, if you have installed star-2023A 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-2023A

You can now run Starlink commands within your current terminal.

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.

Running Software Packages

For most command line packages, typing the name of a package will make its commands available to use, 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 visualization software will launch and you can load in astronomy maps and cubes to view (both SDF and FITS formats are supported).

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 (1.06GB .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 changed for the 2015B release to include flatfield images for the 1.644FeII filter. These were created in 2012 (Kapuahi release) but not previously made publicly available. If you downloaded the tar ball for intervening releases after Lehuakona, you only need to download it again should you require the additional FeII flats.

Starlink: 2023ADownload (last edited 2024-01-10 19:49:23 by SarahGraves)