External software requirements
To work with SAS several external applications must be available
on your computer. Otherwise, although SAS may be ready,
some of its tools will not work properly.
ds9
SAOImage DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application
used by SAS.
- ds9 latest stable version 4.12 works fine with SAS 7.1.0
- ds9 binaries are available here
- Each version of ds9 requires the
X Public Access (XPA) software, which can
be obtained from the same site as ds9. For ds9 version 4.12 the
required xpa version is 2.1.7b2. Notice that XPA is not part of ds9.
- Warning: For older versions of Linux (i.e. Red Hat 9,
Fedora Core 1, SuSE 7.3, etc) please download xpa 2.1.7b2 from
here.
Grace
Grace is a plotting tool based on X11 and Motif, used by SAS for 2D plots display and graphical selection.
- SAS 7.1.0 works fine with grace 5.1.18.
- Source code for grace 5.1.18 can be found
here
Heasoft/Headas
Some SAS tasks require FTOOLS to be installed either individually or
as part of the
HEASOFT
software.
We recommend the installation of HEASOFT version 6.0 (HEADAS) or later,
since SAS 7.1.0 was built with that version
(except for Mac OS X where version 5.3 was used).
Perl
Some SAS tasks require perl. However, the
perl version in your machine does not need to match necessarily
the one used to build SAS.
The perl binary installed in your system must be adapted to work with
SAS as /usr/local/bin/perl, either as a real binary or
as a soft link to any other perl (typically in /usr/bin/perl).
On some GNU/Linux distributions you may have to create
a symbolic link as:
ln -s /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/perl
X11 and Qt requirements on Mac OS X
Differently as on Linux and Solaris platforms, on Mac OS X we can choose between
the native Mac Graphical User Interface (GUI), based on Acqua, and X11.
Since SAS 6.1.0 we have chosen X11 as the base for
SAS GUIs, e.g. sas, xmmselect, calview, odfbrowser, etc.
Such choice has been possible thanks to the
availability of
Qt (SAS GUI library) on X11 or Qt/X11,
provided from the
Fink software repository.
-
X11
To work with this release of SAS on any Mac OS X version, the X Windows
software or X11 (a.k.a X11R6) for Mac Os X must be installed.
The X11 software is provided by Apple for each specific
Mac OS X version. Although the Apple implementation of X11 for Mac OS X 10.2
was incomplete and can not be used, for Mac OS X 10.3.X(Panther) and
10.4.X(Tiger), the Apple X11 software works fine.
As an alternative you can install
Xfree86 on Mac OS X as provided by Fink.
For specific versions of Xfree86 for your Mac OS X version, please
refer to this link.
Notice that the installation of Xfree86 requires
the deinstallation of the X11 from Apple or at least to rename /usr/X11R6.
Look here for details.
-
Qt
There should not be any need to install Qt/X11 for Mac OS X since
the SAS 7.1.0 distribution provides
already the proper Qt library within the libextra tar.gz archive:
- libqt-mt.3.2.2.dylib for the Mac OS X 10.3.X
- libqt-mt.3.3.5 for Mac OS 10.4.X.
Pages maintained by SAS librarian.
Any question about SAS should be addressed to the
XMM-Newton help desk.
Updated on:
July 10, 2007