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20000616: Supported OSes for Unidata McIDAS-X

>From: Anthony James Wimmers <address@hidden>
>Organization: UVa
>Keywords: 200006161438.e5GEchT14323 McIDAS-X 7.6 Linux

Tony,

>I hear that there's a meeting going on over there either now, or sometime
>soon, so I'll be trying to ask easy questions that ask for short answers:
>
>You may have heard that our group is going to Pelston, Michigan for ten
>weeks from about June 25 to August 17.

Right, Jennie told me.

>We're doing meteorological support
>mostly. Jennie's plan is to access windfall remotely by ADDE while we're
>there. To do this, we bought a new laptop installed with Linux 6.2. Now
>I'm in charge of installing mcidas on the laptop. Now, only after we
>bought this thing, I noticed Dee Wade's last email, which I'm attaching
>below. This is the first time I appreciated the meaning of her words,
>"support for Linux will be limited only to Linux 6.0." And that's in the
>future tense, not the present. 

That is SSEC's support of Linux, not Unidata's.  I have been supporting
Unidata McIDAS-X on Linux for quite some time now, so you should not
be overly concerned by her hedging.

>I'm guessing that you would tell me to go ahead and give it a shot.

Yes.

>Right
>now we can always reinstall the whole operating system if we want to, so
>there's nothing to mess up. Anyway, my questions for you are:
>
>1) Should we try to install Mcidas, or should we see what we can do to
>get an earlier version of Linux that is supported?

I have not built Unidata McIDAS-X on RedHat 6.2 yet, but I am anticipating
no problems with it since there were no major changes between 6.1 and 6.2.
I run 7.612 (my latest release) on 6.1 from home and have very little
problems (there are some McIDAS issues related to 24-bit displays that
are annoying some times, but these should go away with the McIDAS 7.7
release).

>2) If we install Mcidas, where do we download the files, and where is
>there an instruction page for downloading, like there's a page for the
>other stages of installation?

You can download the Unidata McIDAS distribution from the same set of
web pages that contain the instructions for building and installing
it.  To convince yourself of this, check out:

Unidata McIDAS-X Home Page
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx/index.html
  Unidata McIDAS-X Table of Contents
  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx/mcidas-x.html 
    Initial Preparations
    http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx/prepare_mcx.html
      Obtaining the Distribution
      http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/mcidas/mcx/getdist.html

>3) Any other advice?

I have had no problems in doing installations or configurations under
Linux, so I don't think that you will have any either.  I do have
two comments:

o if you want to use 8-bit pixmaps (8-bit displays), then use KDE instead
  of GNOME (there are not enough colors available to run McIDAS-X and
  GNOME simultaneously).  I run in 24-bit mode.

o you can access the new machine we installed up at the NCAR mesa for
  GINI imagery (for the high resolution VIS images).  The machine
  name is motherlode.ucar.edu, and the GINI dataset is RTGINI.
  This machine will also be keeping 9 days of McIDAS point source
  data online and a few days of gridded data as well.  Right now, this
  is in addition to 10 hours of imagery from the UW datastream, but
  this number will drastically increase _soon_.

o at some point in the near future, we will be starting to send CIMSS
  products out in the UW datastream.  At that point those products
  (one of which is an ozone image) will also be available from the
  same machine.  The data set will be CIMSSP.
  
>Thanks a bunch,

No problem.  Let me know if you run into any snags (you shouldn't, but...).

Tom