What is GASGANO ?

GASGANO is a Data File Organiser developed and maintained by ESO to help its user community to manage and organise in a systematic way the astronomical data observed and produced by all VLT compliant telescopes, i.e. by telescopes which are being operated through Observation Blocks. The tool also supports FITS files which are not generated by those telescopes with limited functionality. For further information, please, refer to the latest Gasgano User's Manual.

Latest Release

The latest public release of GASGANO is 2.4.8. This GASGANO release

• uses OCA rules for classification
• fixes various minor issues

Important Note

If you wish to interface GASGANO to VLT instrument pipeline recipes build on top of the ESO Common Pipeline Library (CPL) and the qfits library, you will have to download and use the specific instrument package available here. In such case, it is not necessary to download GASGANO from this current page, since it will be automatically provided with the specific instrument package. Please, notice that the latter is currently available only for a few VLT instruments.

System Requirements

GASGANO is a Java application certified for

• Java 7
  
• Scientific Linux 6.3

Even though Scientific Linux 6.3 is available on a range of hardware, the provided distribution assumes that the hardware in question is a 64-bit Intel machine. You may install and run GASGANO on other operating systems - such as other Linux distributions or MacOS X 10.5 - but ESO is not able to guarantee that GASGANO will work correctly in such cases. Notice that this release of GASGANO requires at least Java 7.

Installation

To install GASGANO you need to retrieve the distribution kit, unpack and install it, and start the gasgano executable.

Prerequisites

To use the latest Gasgano version (2.4.8), Java 7 must be available on your system. If not, please, download it from here.

Make sure that the java command is in your search path. Type java -version on the command line to verify that the printed java version is 1.7.x.

Instructions

1. You MUST be under your $HOME directory to install GASGANO:
   

   > cd
   

2. Download the GASGANO Release 2.4.8 into your $HOME directory
3. After the FTP transfer, please, verify the checksum value with the cksum command only. Depending on the distribution, it will be:

      	
   > cksum gasgano-2.4.8.tar.gz
   2150232528 9211564 gasgano-2.4.8.tar.gz
   

4. Backup any existing .gasganorc configuration file you may already have under $HOME:

      	
   > mv $HOME/.gasganorc $HOME/.gasganorc.bck.YYYYMMDD
   

   (where YYYYMMDD is the current date)
5. Backup any existing $HOME/gasgano/ directory you may already have:

      	
   > mv $HOME/gasgano $HOME/gasgano.bck.YYYYMMDD
   

6. Run the following sequence of commands:

      	
   > tar xzvf gasgano-2.4.8.tar.gz
   

   (if you get a 'broken pipe' error, please, run the gunzip command first, then tar).
   This completes the installation process.
7. To run the Gasgano GUI, create a link to point to the new gasgano version:

      	
   > ln -s gasgano-2.4.8 gasgano
   

8. Then, just add $HOME/gasgano/bin to your $PATH environment variable:

      	
   > export PATH="$HOME/gasgano/bin:"$PATH
   

   Possible files to update are:

   	
   $HOME/.bashrc  	
   $HOME/.profile
   

9. Finally, enter the command

   	
   > gasgano
   

   possibly after issuing rehash. Please, notice that this will create a new default .gasganorc configuration file under $HOME.
10. If the GASGANO main panel appears, then you have successfully installed GASGANO. You can then delete the compressed TAR file.
11. As a last step, please verify that you are running the expected GASGANO 2.4.8 release: check the version number listed at the top of the main GASGANO panel.

GASGANO Users' Manual

The GASGANO Users' Manual (Issue 4) is available for download in PDF format, 1.2 Mbytes. Should you experience any problem when opening the document directly from your web browser (a blank document or some error message), please save the file to disk first, and then open it with Acrobat Reader.

Bug Reports

If you experience an unexpected behavior of GASGANO, please, first refer to the list of main known problems, limitations and possible hints for GASGANO release 2.4.3. For any other issues or requests, please send a report to the ESO User Support Department, describing:

• the GASGANO release you are using
• the version of your OS
• the exact sequence of actions you performed before the bug occurred
• what were precisely the symptoms and the possible error message(s)