Installation of the firehose pipeline is a multi-step process. It has been tested on the Mac OSX platform (Leopard and Snow Leopard) and also some Linux implementations. We believe that it is stable in these configurations, but some users have reported difficulties installing aspects of the xidl dependency tree. Users are encouraged to examine (and update if appropriate!) the world-editable bugs wiki for tips on how to improve installation of xidl for use with FIRE.
System Requirements
- Unix installation and license for IDL. Preferably v6.0 or higher.
Installation Procedure
- Download and install the XIDL package of subroutines, provided by J.X. Prochaska. Documentation on installation procedures is provided on the linked website. The XIDL package depends in turn on the SDSS idlspec2d and idlutils packages, so you'll need to install those as well. If you are having trouble installing xidl, especially compiling the externally linked libraries with "evilmake," please refer to the BUGS page on this wiki for help on different operating systems.
- There are 3 minor changes you'll need to make to xidl, to add FIRE as an instrument and also to plug a known memory leak. Please refer to this page for detailed instructions.
- Download and unpack the tarball for the latest release of the firehose code base. This usually goes into the directory pointed to by the environment variable $IDL_LOCAL.
- Set a new environment variable $FIRE_DIR in your shell (e.g. via a .cshrc or similar configuration file) to point to the directory where you unpacked the FIREHOSE code.
- Add $FIRE_DIR to your $IDL_PATH
- Start up and idl session. At the command prompt, type " which, 'x_specplot' ". If IDL returns the path of this procedure properly, your xidl environment variables are set up correctly.
- From the IDL command prompt, type "firehose." This should bring up a GUI used for the reduction procedure and indicates that your paths are set up correctly.