Official Announcement of the 02SEPpl1.2 ESO-MIDAS Release

The official 02SEPpl1.2 release of ESO-MIDAS has been released
on November 11, 2002 and is available on our ftp accounts and on CD-ROM
(only on request).

Below you find the following information concerning this new release:

What's new or upgraded in ESO-MIDAS 02SEP?
Platform availability
Source distribution of ESO-MIDAS 02SEPpl1.2
ESO-MIDAS on a CD-ROM
Technical Support and Network Services

What's new or upgraded in MIDAS 02SEPpl1.2?

All important enhancements, new developments and bugfixes can be found in the file /midas/02SEP/prim/help/news.alq and displayed in Midas via the command

Midas> help [News]

Here we list the most important ones:

02FEB

ALIGN/INTERACTIVE
New command ALIGN/INTER to align two images interactively (and easily!). See the help for details.

SET/MIDAS workenv=FITS
FITS files are now seamlessly integrated into Midas. With the command SET/MIDAS workenv=FITS it's possible to read/write all data files in FITS format. Accordingly, the command SET/MIDAS DEFTYPE= has been removed!

Logical FITS keyword
Logical descriptors have been implemented in Midas to support the usage of logical FITS keywords. See the help of the descr. commands for details.

02SEP

Printers in Midas
The handling of printers in Midas/AGL via the configuration file `agldevs.dat' has been changed. If you have a standard Postscript printer (b+w or colour) you don't have to enter it anymore into the `agldevs.dat' file, because grayscale Postcript is the default, now. However, to use colour postscript printers you have to specify the printer as "pxyz.c" - to enforce colour printing. Another possibility is to still insert this printer in the `agldevs.dat' file with colour specifications. Only the printer used as the generic laser printer (LASER), as well as all printers which do not use Postscript still need the usual specifications in that configuration file. However, printers with names like "laser1" do need special treatment (in $MIDASHOME/$MIDVERS/monit/devices.sh) because that conflicts with the generic name "LASER" used in Midas, this was a problem also before...
LYMAN context
The installation for the Lyman context was modified - this context should now work as expected also on Linux systems.
INIDSK/MFITS
This command has been updated to enable the extraction of one or more specific extensions from a FITS file.
CONVERT/RADEC New command CONVERT/RADEC for the conversion of decimal world coords to RA and DEC representation has been implemented. See the help for details.
Mac OSX
The 02SEP release of Midas is now ported to the Mac OSX system (Darwin). Thanks to the help of John Walsh at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies also the GUIs do work now (especially the Help GUI). For the ones who want to know exactly which version of OSX, on the Mac (ma004063 at ESO) the command: $ uname -a yields:
Darwin ma004063.hq.eso.org 6.1 Darwin Kernel Version 6.1: Fri Sep 6 23:24:34 PDT 2002; root:xnu/xnu-344.2.obj~2/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

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

Platform availability

MIDAS 02SEPpl1.2 has been installed and verified on the following platforms:

SUN Solaris 5.6	SUN Solaris 5.8
Mac OSX 10.1 / 10.2	HP HP-UX B.11.00
Intel/Linux SuSE 8.0	Intel/Linux RedHat 7.3
Alpha/OSF1 V4.0D	Alpha/Linux SuSE 7.1
VMS

Note: The latest VMS-version of ESO-MIDAS can be obtained from the Royal Observatory in Brussels . Please contact Jean-Pierre de Cuyper (system@midasc.oma.be) for more information concerning VMS and ESO-MIDAS.

Source distribution

As you may already know, MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License since 95NOVpl2.1. Since then we are not requiring anymore the prior MIDAS User Agreement in order to get access to MIDAS sources.

02SEPpl1.2 is available as source code.

For a proper installation of MIDAS sources follow the procedure of the installation document provided in PostScript (installunix.ps.Z) and html format (installunix.html) ESO-MIDAS is a copyright protected software product of the European Southern Observatory, and provides general tools for image processing and data reduction.

Since 1995, ESO-MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License. This means that the ESO-MIDAS system is available free of charge and can be freely redistributed on certain conditions.

ESO-MIDAS on a CD-ROM

On request, a CD-ROM will be produced for institutes which do not have sufficient internet accessibility for ftp retrieval. These research Institutes can order the CD-ROM directly from the ESO-MIDAS Group by sending an email to midas@eso.org.

The ESO-MIDAS CD-ROM contains the release 02SEPpl1.2 and will include source code ONLY.
Get detailed information about the CD-ROM in our CD booklet.

Technical Support and Network Services

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, as of the 95NOV release 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 advised 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:

Email: 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/pub/midaspub
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.

Email:	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/pub/midaspub
WWW:	http://www.eso.org/esomidas
Mailing lists:	midas-announce (for official announcements) midas-users (for general discussion)