Dear PyMidas Tester,

Thank you again for offering to test this software. We much appreciate your
feedback so that we can rapidly improve the product ready for demonstrations
at the ADASS meeting in Spain in early October 2005 and a more general release.

Note that some parts of this software, such as documentation, are still at 
a relatively early stage of development and will be significantly
enhanced before final release. We apologise for any omissions.

The software may be downloaded from www.eso.org/sampo/pymidas where
you will find compressed tar and RPM files. PyMidas needs MIDAS 05JUN or
later and this very recent and unreleased version must be downloaded and
installed. PyMidas will not work with older MIDAS installations. Apart from 
MIDAS it you also need to download PyMidas itself and the installation 
instructions. The total size is about 88MB. Once installed about 350MB of 
space is needed, mostly for the MIDAS installation. We also recommend that 
you install both MIDAS and PyMidas in an empty scratch directory for the 
purpose of testing.

This test bundle is intended only for use on recent Linux machines. It was
developed on Fedora Core 3 but has been tested on several other recent
Linux platforms. Also note that Python version 2.3 or later is needed
as well as the gcc compiler. For experiments you may also like to have
PyRAF installed (http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf).
Although we hope to have versions of PyMidas for MacOSX and Solaris in the 
near future they are not available at this stage.

Once PyMidas is installed and started we suggest that you familiarise yourself 
with the PyMidas syntax and its relation to MIDAS and Python. Information about
this can be obtained by typing ".info" at the PyMidas prompt. There are
three modes of operation, standard interactive Python style, "mimic mode"
which behaves exactly like normal MIDAS (but doesn't allow full use
of Python) and Python scripting style. A draft user manual is also
available which gives more details and some examples.

We would be very grateful if you would install PyMidas, experiment with it
and report problems and suggestions to us as soon as possible. We hope
to correct problems as well as we can before the ADASS meeting.

Bugs should be reported using the web page:

http://sombrero.astro.helsinki.fi/SampoUserBug1.nsf

and more general comments should be sent to: pymidas@eso.org.

PyMidas is a pilot project which forms part of the Sampo project
(www.eso.org/sampo) and it is not a formally supported ESO software
product.

Thank you again for your help.

Richard Hook (Sampo Project Manager)
Palle Moller (Sampo Project Scientist)
Sami Maisala (PyMidas developer)
Tero Oittinen (PyMidas developer)
Ville Savolainen (Sampo Finnish Coordinator)
Marko Ullgren (Sampo System Architect)
Otto Solin (Sampo developer)