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Next: 3. Quick start tutorial Up: Fitsblink 2.1 user manual Previous: 1. Introduction

Subsections

2. Installation

2.1 Hardware and software requirements

The fitsblink program will in principle run on a PC 486, 8 MB of RAM, 1024x768 pixel graphics card and 15'' color monitor. It will be rather slow, however, and the amount of images loaded at one time will be limited. The recommended configuration is Pentium 200 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 1280x1024 video card and 17'' monitor or better.

Other platforms: any equivalently powerful Unix workstations should be good enough. However, it is up to you to obtain appropriate libraries and compile the program. Fitsblink uses cfitsio 1.42 and xforms 0.88 libraries. Please do not attempt to use any earlier versions of these libraries because the program will not work with them. Note that I didn't even attempt to compile fitsblink 2.0 on any other platform.

To do astrometry, you also need CD-ROMs with GSC 1.1 star catalog and/or USNO SA 1.0 catalog. In principle you can also have exact copies of these catalogs on hard disk, if you wish to avoid mounting and unmounting of CD-ROM drives and your hard disk is big enough.

2.2 Getting executables

You can get the compiled program for the Linux system on
http://kronos.ijs.si/~jure/fitsblink/fitsblink.html.

2.3 Compiling

Sources of fitsblink are available at
http://kronos.ijs.si/~jure/fitsblink/fitsblink.html. You can find the cfitsio 1.42 library at
ftp://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/software/fitsio/c/ and the xforms 0.88 library at
http://bragg.phys.uwm.edu/xforms. If you really want to compile fitsblink by yourself, make sure that you install these libraries properly. Then edit the makefile and enter proper paths for include files and libraries. You also need to change C compiler switches if you don't use GNU C. Then type make and hope for the best. If you succeed in compiling fitsblink for some other platform and you wish to share the binary code with other people, you are welcome to send it to me and I will add it to the fitsblink home page.

2.4 Installation

When you get a working binary, you can install it to a directory which is listed in your path, for example /usr/local/bin. When you run fitsblink for the first time, it will complain about not finding a parameter file. Just proceed with the program and choose the Settings item in the Astrometry menu. Write in your default settings and press the Save button. A file which contains your settings is named .fitsblinkrc and is written to your home directory. For those less familiar with Unix, files starting with a dot are ``hidden'', i.e. normally not shown by the ls command.

The user manual (this one) serves also as the help file. It is a good idea to put it to some known place, such as /usr/local/lib/fitsblink.

You can install the fitsblink program (default location /usr/local/bin) and user manual (default location /usr/local/lib/fitsblink by typing make install. You must be root for this.

2.5 Known bugs

After erasing images from the memory sometimes a segmentaion fault appears. This bug appears relatively infrequently and is difficult to reproduce. Actually it has not happened for some two month now and maybe it is gone now. Nevertheless, the author would be grateful on any documented example how to reproduce this or any other bug reliably.

You can't use USNO catalog on big-endian computers.


next up previous contents
Next: 3. Quick start tutorial Up: Fitsblink 2.1 user manual Previous: 1. Introduction
Jure Skvarc
1998-09-26