Official Annoucement of the 97NOVpl2.0 ESO-MIDAS Release

The official 97NOVpl2.0 release of ESO-MIDAS has been released on February 9, 1998 and is available on our ftp accounts.

Below you find the following information concerning this new release:

What's new or upgraded in ESO-MIDAS 97NOV?
Platform availability
Source and binary distribution of ESO-MIDAS 97NOVpl2.0
ESO-MIDAS 97NOV documentation
ESO-MIDAS under the GNU General Public License
ESO-MIDAS on a CD-ROM
Technical Support and Network Services

What's new or upgraded in MIDAS 97NOVpl2.0?

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

Old and new (long) descr. formats are both supported, use SET/MIDAS to switch to old descr. format; however, this is not really recommended because the new format is backwards compatible. But if you have compelling reasons go ahead.
Support for displays supporting true color mode (i.e. having 8 bits per red, green, blue color component) has been implemented. A new 5th parameter has been added to the INITIALIZE/DISPLAY command to set up a display for true color mode.
Normally double quotes (") are taken as special characters to enclose spaces in a single token; using a backslash in front will make the double quotes be treated like a normal char, e.g.:
```
     Midas> write/out \"this is a quote\"
     "this is a quote" 
     Midas> write/out "this is no quote"
     this is no quote
  
```
Command OUTDISK/ASCII has been added to convert Midas images to ASCII files which contain one data value per file record, i.e. the pixels are stored as a single column. Several data reduction packages require ASCII input data to be in that format (e.g. MATLAB).
Random number generator which does not need the NAG library was added
Correction of problems in the OVER/ERROR command with logarithmic error bars and with using sequence parameter.
Plot (meta) file names are now case sensitive
Context CCDRED: a number of command have been updated
Context CCDRED: a bug in the command for applying the illumination correction was.
Context ALICE: fix problem with printing the displayed spectrum
A bug was fix in the command GET/GCURSOR. The values are now correctly appended to in the descriptor.

For details use the command: help [News] or click on [News] topic in the graphical user interface.

Platform availability

MIDAS 97NOVpl2.0 has been installed and verified on the following platforms:

SUN Solaris 2.5	HP HP-UX A.10.10	PC Linux/2.0.28
HP HP-UX A.10.20 (2)	SG IRIX/5.2	DEC OSF1/V4.0 (1)
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)

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. In the meantime there is a patch available from DEC - for details contact Carlo Izzo at Max-Planck (izzo@rosat.mpe-garching.mpg.de).
The packages "pepsys","romafot" and "irac2" are not available with the binary version of MIDAS for HP-UX 10.20
MIDAS 97NOV has been ported to VMS and Open/VMS systems by an external site. For those of you interested in MIDAS 97NOV for VMS and Open/VMS please contact Jean-Pierre De Cuyper at "jeanpier@oma.be" or "midas@oma.be".

Source and binary distribution

MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License. Therefore, source code and documentation are, under certain conditions, freely available. For more infomration please see under ESO-MIDAS under the GNU General Public License

97NOVpl2.0 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 97NOVpl2.0 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/97NOV/sources (ESO-MIDAS sources)
/midaspub/97NOV/linux (PC Linux/2.0.28) (1)
/midaspub/97NOV/hp_ux (HP HP-UX A.10.10) (2)
/midaspub/97NOV/alpha_osf (DEC OSF1/V4.0)
/midaspub/97NOV/ibm_aix (IBM/AIX 4.1)
/midaspub/97NOV/sg_irix (SG IRIX/5.2)
/midaspub/97NOV/solaris (SUN Solaris 2.5)
Files: README.sources
97NOVpl2.0.tar.Z

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).
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 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/97NOV/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: Command Description ESO-MIDAS Environment AGL Documentation ESO-MIDAS Frequent Asked Questions IDI Documentation ESO-MIDAS 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.

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.

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 sent to the address given below.

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 includes all source code, documentation in various formats, binaries for the platform listed above, calibration and demonstration data, and as well the complete Linux release.

Research Institutes can order the CD-ROM directly from the ESO-MIDAS Group by filling out the ESO-MIDAS Problem Reporting Form (category distribution), or just by sending an email to midas@eso.org. Others are kindly invited to contact ESO Education and Public Relations Department at ips@eso.org or use their Order Form.

Technical Support and Network Services

Technical support for ESO-MIDAS can be obtained using the ESO-MIDAS Helpdesk by filling out the ESO-MIDAS Problem Reporting Form Others are kindly invited to contact the ESO Education and Public Relations Department <ipr@eso.org>.

Please note, that 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, 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 and Operations 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.

Electronic mail:	midas@eso.org
Telefax:	+49 89 32006480 (attn.: MIDAS Support)
Post:	Data Management and Operations Division - User Support Group Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, D-85748 Garching bei Muenchen, Germany

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)