External Software Requirements

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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 5.2 works fine with SAS 8.0.0
• 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 5.2 the required xpa version is 2.1.9. 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 8.0.0 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 8.0.0 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), 10.4.X(Tiger) and 10.5.X(Leopard), 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 8.0.0 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 and 10.5.X.