Installation of SAS

For each supported operating system, the release of SAS is now bundled in a single tgz archive with all its components (including eventually some additional patches) and a shell script used to install it (install.sh). The tgz archive has the generic name sas_N.N.N-OS.tgz, where

• N.N.N is the version number, e.g. 8.0.0
• OS is an abbreviation of the Operating System acronym and version where it was built, e.g. darwin8.10.0

All SAS installations are binary. We do not provide support on building SAS from source code but this is available for each release and can be downloaded for reference.

When installing SAS, please read the page on the external tools required to work together with it. Missing any of these tools would not allow you to work with SAS properly.

Please take into account that for running SAS you will need also the calibration data contained in the so-called Current Calibration Files (CCF). Go to the CCF pages for learning how to download and install them.

Common installation procedure to all Operating Systems

Download the specific tgz archive for your operating system and put it in a directory of your choice, for example let this be /top_dir.

Next, unpack the tgz archive with the command

tar zxf sas_N.N.N-OS.tgz

and inmediately after, execute the install.sh script as follows

./install.sh

and let it run until completion.

The installation shell script will check for the presence of all required SAS software components according to an installation manifest named sas_N.N.N_install_manifest-OS.txt, install all in turn and configure them for inmediate use.

The installation script creates below /top_dir a directory named xmmsas_20080701_1801 (xmmsas_20080701_1803 on Mac OS X), which contains the whole SAS software and launches configure_install that will write in the same directory two scripts named setsas.sh and setsas.csh. These are the scripts you can use later on to intialize the SAS.

The configure_install shell script makes several sanity checks about the installation and informs the user about them. The most important of these checkings is the existence of perl in /usr/local/bin either as a real binary or as a soft link to a binary placed in another location, typically in /usr/bin. Should your installation miss perl in the expected location, please proceed to correct the situation and re-run the configure_install shell script again.

Setup

Depending on your shell, source either setsas.sh or setsas.csh, as follows:

. ./setsas.sh (sh/bash/ksh)

source ./setsas.csh (csh/tcsh)

The previous commands should be replaced by

. /top_dir/xmmsas_20080701_1801/setsas.sh (sh/bash/ksh)

source /top_dir/xmmsas_20080701_1801/setsas.csh (csh/tcsh)

when invoked from any other place of your system.

The setsas.[c]sh scripts take care of all the necessary details to initialize properly the environment to run SAS in your operating system, except for the SAS_CCFPATH, the SAS_ODF and the SAS_CCF environment variables, which must be defined by you explicitly to tell SAS where to find the XMM-Newton data you want to analyze and the calibration files needed to do it.

For more details consult the documentation links in particular the SAS start-up thread.