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Official Annoucement of the 96NOVpl2.0 ESO-MIDAS Release

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The official 96NOVpl2.0 release of ESO-MIDAS has been released on June 18, 1997 and is available on our ftp accounts.

 *

Below you find the following information concerning this new release:

What's new or upgraded in MIDAS 96NOVpl2.0?

The following list is just a summary. A more detailed list can be obtained, after installation, with the MIDAS command "help [news]"

Platform availability

MIDAS 96NOVpl2.0 has been installed and verified on the following platforms:

SUN SunOS/4.1.3 SUN Solaris 2.5 HP HP-UX A.10.10
HP HP-UX A.10.20 SG IRIX/5.2 DEC OSF1/V4.0 (1)
PC Linux/2.0.28 (2) IBM AIX/V4.1  
Alpha(AXP) Open VMS V6.1 and V7.0, Fortran V6.3 and DECC V5.3
VAX Open VMS VMS V6.1, FORTRAN V6.4 and DECC V5.3 (3)
  1. On OSF1/V4.0 MIDAS does not work when running on a "Advanced File System" (AFS) due to a bug in the OS already reported to Digital. MIDAS works fine on any local file system.In the meantime there is a patch available from DEC - for details contact Carlo Izzo at Max-Planck (izzo@rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de).
  2. MIDAS 96NOV has been tested and verified with both, the fortran_to_C converter 'f2c' and the GNU Fortran compiler 'g77'.
  3. MIDAS 96NOV has been ported to VMS and Open/VMS systems by an external site. For those of you interested in MIDAS 96NOV for VMS and Open/VMS please contact Jean-Pierre De Cuyper at "jeanpier@oma.be" or "midas@oma.be".

Source and binary distribution for MIDAS 96NOVpl2.0

As you may already know, MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License since 95NOVpl2.0. Since then we are not requiring anymore the prior MIDAS User Agreement in order to get access to MIDAS sources.

96NOVpl2.0 is also available in binary format for all supported platforms. Binary copies of MIDAS are already compiled and ready to run. Installation is reduced to just the tuning of some configuration files.

Source and binary copies of 96NOVpl2.0 are available in our anonymous ftp account:
Ftp host: ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org
Ftp account: "ftp"
Ftp Password: <your e-mail address>
Directory: /midaspub/96NOV/sources (ESO-MIDAS sources)
/midaspub/96NOV/linux (PC Linux/2.0.28)(1)
/midaspub/96NOV/hp_ux (HP HP-UX A.10.10)(2)
/midaspub/96NOV/alpha_osf (DEC OSF1/V4.0)
/midaspub/96NOV/ibm_aix (IBM/AIX 4.1)
/midaspub/96NOV/sg_irix (SG IRIX/5.2)
/midaspub/96NOV/solaris (SUN Solaris 2.5)
Files: README.sources
96NOVpl2.0.tar.Z

  1. The binary of MIDAS for Linux/2.0.28 was done in a slackware distribution with the 'f2c' (fortran_to_C converter) and not with 'g77' so no Fortran library is necessary. This binary copy of MIDAS has also been tested and verified in a Linux RedHat 4.2 distribution (Linux/2.0.30).
  2. The binary of MIDAS for HP-UX 10.10 has been tested and verified to run also on HP-UX 10.20.

For a proper installation of MIDAS sources follow the procedure of the installation document provided in PostScript (installunix.ps.Z) and DVI format (installunix.dvi.Z)

MIDAS is distributed on all platforms with Graphical User Interfaces GUI using the Motif dynamic shared libraries, except for Linux where all GUIs are linked with the static Motif library.

ESO-MIDAS 96NOV documentation

ESO-MIDAS documentation is available in Postscript and DVI format (eventually also in HTML format) in our "anonymous" ftp account:
Ftp host: ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org
Ftp account: "ftp"
Ftp Password: <your mail address>
Directory: /midaspub/96NOV/doc
Files: vol1.ps.z
vol2_ps.tar
vol3_ps.ta
env.ps.z
agldoc.tar.Z
midas-faq.doc.Z
ididoc.ps.Z
midas-html.tar.Z
ESO-MIDAS Volume A: System
ESO-MIDAS Volume B: Data Reduction
ESO-MIDAS Volume C: Detailed Command Description
ESO-MIDAS Environment
AGL Documentation
ESO-MIDAS Frequent Asked Questions
IDI Documentation
ESO-MIDAS complete documentation in HTML

In particular cases printed copies and updates of documentation can also be obtained from ESO. If you absolutely need hardcopies of the documentation please contact the User Support Group at ESO/Munich.

ESO-MIDAS under the GNU General Public License

ESO-MIDAS is a copyright protected software product of the European Southern Observatory, and provides general tools for image processing and data reduction.

ESO-MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License. This means that the ESO-MIDAS system is available, free of charge and can freely redistributed on certain conditions. As a consequence of this distribution policy User Agreements between research institutes and ESO will not apply as of ESO-MIDAS release 95NOVpl2.0 and will not be prolongated when they expire.

A short statement if the GNU General Public License is included in all relevant ESO-MIDAS files and follows below. The full GNU License text is included in the ESO-MIDAS release as separate text file.


Copyright (C) 1995,1996,1997 European Southern Observatory (ESO)

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Massachusetss Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Correspondence concerning ESO-MIDAS should be addressed as follows: Internet e-mail: midas@eso.org Postal address: European Southern Observatory Data Management Division/User Support Group Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2 D 85748 Garching bei Munchen GERMANY

ESO-MIDAS on a CD-ROM

The 97NOV release of ESO-MIDAS will not appear on CD-ROM. CD-ROMs containing release 96NOVpl2.0 are available still and can be obtained from ESO. It ncludes all source code, documentation, and verification procedures. The complete list of what is on the CD-ROM is given below.

Research Institutes can order the CD-ROM directly from the ESO-MIDAS Group by filling out the MIDAS Problem Report Form or to send a mail to midas@eso.org. Others are kindly invited to contact the ESO Education and Public Relations Department <ipr@eso.org>.

Technical Support and Network Services

ESO is not in the position to give active support to individual users outside research institutions neither to support ESO-MIDAS installations on PC/Linux systems. Also, as of the 95NOV release we have reduced the support for VMS and OpenVMS systems. Therefore, users who have problems or questions concerning ESO-MIDAS running on these systems are adviced to use the "midas-users" mailing list for obtaining feedback and solutions to their questions from other users. In case the ESO-MIDAS Problem Report System cannot be used the MIDAS User Support can be contacted via:
 * Electronic mail: midas@eso.org
 * Telefax: +49 89 32006480 (attn.: MIDAS Support)
 * Post: Data Management Division - User Support Group
Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2,
D-85748 Garching bei Muenchen,
Germany

Other public services

 * Anonymous ftp: ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org
 * WWW: http://www.eso.org/esomidas/
 * Mailing lists: midas-announce (for official announcements)
midas-users (for general discussion)

To subscribe to these mailing lists, send a mail to majordomo@eso.org with the following command in the body of your email message: "subscribe midas-announce <email>", or "subscribe midas-users <email>", where <email> should be your e-mail address.

For your questions, comments, problems, etc, related to ESO-MIDAS, please use the ESO-MIDAS Problem Report Form.


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