So you want to do this at home


1. On Santa Barbara Street
2. Elsewhere


On Santa Barbara Street


The COSMOS2 software is installed on pavo, and should be usable from any machine running linux Redhat 9. valpariaso is configured for this, and can be used if your own machine is unsuitable.

Before running any programs, you must do the following:


 The documentation is available locally at www.ociw.edu/~oemler/COSMOS2


Installing COSMOS2 on your own machine

A gzipped tarfile containing the COSMOS2 distribution may be downloaded from HERE. This distribution is known to work on Redhat 8 and 9, should work on most other linux systems, and may work on any unix variant.  It  also works on Mac OS10.3 and should work on 10.4.

Dependancies

Besides the usual stuff, you will need:
If you wish to use the gui programs setcosdir. defineobs, and viewspectra, you will also need the following perl modules:

Installation

  1. Retrieve the COSMOS2 tarfile.
  2. On your system, create a directory into which the cosmos2 system will be installed.
  3. define the environment variable COSMOS_HOME to be that directory, e.g.
  4.    setenv COSMOS_HOME "/home/joe_user/my-cosmos2-directory"
  5. move the tarfile to this directory
  6. extract the tarfile  tar -xzvf cosmos2.tgz
  7. execute cd source
  8. You are now ready to build the executable files, but first make sure that the library files that are needed are in the expected locations, i.e. /lib, /usr/lib, etc. The libraries in question are:
    1. libpgplot
    2. libcpgplot
    3. libcfitsio
    4. libX11
If they are not, you must do one of the following:
  • copy the files into $COSMOS_HOME/lib
  • create symbolic links to the files in $COSMOS_HOME/lib
  • specify the locations on the make command line, as seen below,

Now, you are ready to execute the make command

    make -f Makefile.system [PGLIB = "pgplot-dir" XLIB = "Xll-dir" FITSLIB = "fits-dir"]

where system is either "Mac" or "linux", and the options in backets are only needed if the above mentioned library files are not in their expected locations.
With a little luck, you will get no error messages, and at the end you will have a completely installed system. The most likely errors are due to a failure to find all the library files. Check their locations.

Some final tidying:
    1. execute, and copy into your shell startup file (e.g. cshdef, .cshrc) the following commands so that they will be defined in each window you open:

    2. setenv COSMOS_HOME "/home/joe-user/my-cosmos2-directory"
      source $COSMOS_HOME/cosmos2-setup
        setenv COSMOS_PAR_DIR "/home/joe-user/my-Cospar-directory"
where my-cosmos2-directory and my-cospar-directory are the locations you have chosen for the cosmos2 software and the Cospar files

    1. If you wish to use the IRAF routines display8 and imcombine8, you must execute the following lines at the cl prompt, or put them in your login.cl file. Note that you must specify the full path to the cosmos directory, since iraf forgets your environment variables, such as COSMOS_HOME

    2. task combine8 = "/home/joe_user/my-cosmos-directory/bin/combine8.cl"
      task display8 = "/home/joe_user/my-cosmos-directory/bin/display8.cl"
    3. The html documentation is available locally at $COSMOS_HOME/docs/COSMOS.html.
    4. Move the Cospar directory to the location you have chosen, as described above.

Need some help?
Since you are a pioneer, you deserve a little help. If you can't get things to work properly, contact Gus Oemler at oemler@ociw.edu and we'll try to sort things out.


Back to the Table of Contents