This file describes the installation process for yaxx (Yet Another X-ray Xtractor). Yaxx is a perl script which automates the process of extracting and fitting Chandra ACIS spectra using CIAO tools and Sherpa. It depends only on free open source software (apart from certain exceptions within CIAO itself).
Yaxx has been tested on these operating systems:
Support for MacOS X is awaiting a patch to a bug in the CIAO dmcoords tool. Parties interested in using yaxx on MacOS should contact the author directly about a possible workaround.
Perl version 5.8.0 or newer. All non-standard packages used by yaxx are included in this distribution.
CIAO version 3.3 or newer.
To install and test yaxx, do the following:
csh
or tcsh
do
source <CIAO_HOME>/bin/ciao.csh
Note that if the FTOOLS package is used within the same session as CIAO then the FTOOLS initialization must be done before CIAO initialization. Search for ``Other Software Packages'' in the CIAO documentation for further details.
perl -v
cd
then yaxx will be installed in ~/yaxx/.
gunzip --stdout yaxx.tar.gz | tar xvf -
This will create a 'yaxx' directory and put the contents there.
cd yaxx
make
This runs the perl script install_yaxx.pl which puts the necessary perl modules in the yaxx-perl directory of the source distribution.
If any library or module fails to compile or pass its internal tests, the install script will ask if you want to quit or continue. Depending on the severity of the failure, it may be possible to push through and still have a working system. Please email me (taldcroft at cfa.harvard.edu) with details if any modules do not compile. See also the section on Known Issues.
make test
The final product is a report (Test/Data/obs877/src1/report.ps) which summarizes the fitting.
If this does not work, please email me with the output.
This came up on two Solaris systems. In these cases the issue was resolved without having to recompile perl by reverting to an older compiler with a command similar to:
set path = ( /opt/SUNWspro_6.1/bin $path )
Details will vary with your installation.