The 96NOVpl2.1 ESO-MIDAS Release on CD-ROM

The MIDAS Group of ESO is happy to announce the ESO-MIDAS CD-ROM containing the release 96NOVpl2.1 (patch level 2.1) of ESO-MIDAS. Below follows an overview of the contents of the CD-ROM and the minimum system requirements to be able to use it.

Available on this CD-ROM:

ESO-MIDAS 96NOVpl2.1 sources

ESO-MIDAS 96NOVpl2.1 binaries for:

PC/Linux 2.0.28 or higher

HP-UX 9000 A.10.10

Sun/Solaris 2.5

Silicon Graphics IRIX 5.3

Alpha/OSF1 V4.0

IBM/RS6000 AIX 4.1

Calibration data for all platforms above

Demonstration data for all platforms above

ESO-MIDAS 96NOV documentation in:

Postscript format

DVI format

HTML format

ESO-MIDAS 96NOVpl2.1 ready to run from CD-ROM on PC/Linux

Complete RedHat 4.2 distribution for PC/Linux

Complete Xephem 3.0 sources and binary for PC/Linux

System Requirements

PC with microprocessor 386 or higher (486 or higher recommended)

8 Mbyte of RAM (16 Mbyte recommended)

200 Mbyte of hard disk space, depending on space requirements for actual data

CD-ROM drive

Super VGA with 256 colours

Linux operating system, version 2.0.28 or later

How to Order

The CD-ROM is available to everyone interested in the ESO-MIDAS. Registrated research institutes will received the ESO-MIDAS CD-ROM in the coming weeks. Other sites wishing to receive the CD-ROM should contact the MIDAS Support Group, either by e-mail (midas@eso.org) or via the ESO-MIDAS WWW Help interface.

Individuals wishing to receive a copy of the ESOMIDAS CD-ROM are kindly invited to contact the Education and Public Relations Department (e-mail: ips@eso.org).

To remind you, the ESO-MIDAS products contained on the CD-ROM, are available via our anonymous ftp server: ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org/midaspub. The ftp services include regular patches and updates of ESO-MIDAS.

Errata and Warnings

Below you find a number of corrections of the text in the booklet that comes with the CD-ROM and on the inlay card

1. In the MIDAS CD-ROM booklet

Section: RUNNING FROM THE CD-ROM (ONLY FOR LINUX)
Run MIDAS with the command:

% inmidas -h /cdrom/midas

or set the variable MIDASHOME to /cdrom/midas before executing:

% inmidas

Section: INSTALL THE PRODUCT(S)
On Solaris the CD-ROM may be mounted automatically as "/cdrom/96nov_pl2_1#2". The character "#" may affect some WEB browsers like "netscape 3.01" if you try to load MIDAS HTML documentation. If so, dismount the CD-ROM and mount it as just "/cdrom", or copy the HTML MIDAS documentation to your local disk.

Section:STEP 3 - TEST THE INSTALLATION PROCEDURE
The MIDAS verification procedures requires to install the package "verify.tar.Z" first, otherwise the "verify3.prg" test will fail with the message: "Warning: Cannot open file:nttexample.mt". The compressed tar file can be retrieved from the our anonymous ftp server: ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org/midaspub/96NOV/ in the platform sub-directories.

2. In the MIDAS CD-ROM inlay-card

The ESO Skycat Tool was dropped from the MIDAS CD-ROM for capacity reasons.

The mountain Paranal where the ESO Very Large Telescope is being erected, is located 130 km south of Antofagasta.

Send comments to <midas@eso.org>
Last update: Oct 9, 1998