Obtaining CASA for Linux
Introduction
CASA is available for any interested user. You can find information about the software on
http://casa.nrao.edu, including release notes and known issues.
To install CASA for Linux, we have packaged up a binary distribution of CASA which is available as a downloadable tar file. We believe this binary distribution works with most Linux distributions.
While the binary distribution is the only supported public distribution, most CASA developers use RPMs for many third-party packages installed with
yum to do development on
RedHat Enterprise Linux. Installing the developer RPMs requires root access and we only provide developer support for organizations which have a cooperative agreement to participate in the development of CASA.
We are currently working on the development of a distribution for developers similar to our standard binary distribution, but it is not yet ready for testing.
Installation
You do not have to have
root or
sudo permission, you can easily install CASA, delete it, move it, and it works for many versions of Linux.
The one caveat is that CASA on Linux currently will not run if the
Security-Enhanced Linux option of the linux operating system is set to
enforcing. For the non-root install to work.
SElinux must be set to
disabled or
permissive (in
/etc/selinux/config
) or you must run (as root):
setsebool -P allow_execheap=1
Otherwise, you will encounter errors like:
casapy: error while loading shared libraries: /opt/casa/casapy-20.0.5653-001/lib/liblapack.so.3.1.1: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied
The non-root installation is thought to work on a wide variety of linux platforms including:
and it may work for other versions of Linux. Please see our
regression tables for a list of the platforms we test.
The non-root install may work on other platforms not listed, please let us know if you find that this binary distribution of CASA works on other linux platforms.
Also note, that the plotting tasks like plotxy and plotcal are the ones that typically give problems for new platforms, so a check of these after attempting an unsupported platform installation is advisable.
Download & Unpack
You can download the distribution tar file from
http://svn.cv.nrao.edu/casa/linux_distro.
This directory will contain two tar files one will be the 32-bit version of CASA and the other will be the 64-bit version of CASA. The file name of the 64-bit version ends with
-64b.tar.gz
.
After downloading the appropriate tar file, untar it with
tar -zxf casapy-30.0.*.tar.gz
. This will extract a directory with the same basename as the tar file. Change to that directory and add it to your path with, for example,
PATH=`pwd`:$PATH
. After that, you should be able to start CASA by running
casapy
.
If you encounter difficulties, please see our list of
known problems.
Register for Support
If you would like to receive CASA support, please
register for access to the
NRAO Portal (my.nrao.edu). Registering will allow us to respond to defects and let you know when updates are available.
Developer Installation
Doing development in CASA currently requires
root or
sudo permission to install the prerequisite third party packages and it is only available for the versions of linux for which we have specifically built the necessary packages. Currently only
RedHat Enterprise Linux:
- RHEL 4 (32 bit and 64 bit)
- RHEL 5 (32 bit and 64 bit)
Using Yum
We use yum to install and update the CASA RPMs. Yum is a package manager which downloads and installs CASA and all of its dependencies. See
BuildingCasaLinux if you would like to see a list of its dependencies.
Update
If you have previously installed CASA using
yum
, you should be able to update to the most recent patch version by logging in as
root and doing:
yum update casapy
or by running:
sudo yum update casapy
In the case of
sudo
, enter your
UNIX password when prompted.
If you have not previously installed CASA or if the above update fails, continue reading...
Initial Install
You
must either have the
root password for your system or have
sudo
permissions to run commands as root.
We provide RPMs for
RedHat Enterprise Linux (4 & 5), but this distribution has been used with success on
Scientific Linux. 32 and 64 bit versions are available. If you try to install the 32 bit version on a 64 bit OS, you may run into dependency conflicts between the 32 bit versions of RPMs that CASA is linked against and pre-existing 64 bit RPMs already installed on your system.
On Linux we use
yum to install and update CASA. To use yum, information about the CASA Linux repository must be added to yum's configuration. We have a
bootstrap.linux script which adds this configuration information to yum. Although, yum is now part of the standard distribution of
RedHat. This was not true for
RedHat Enterprise Linux 4. For this version of Linux, the
bootstrap.linux will both install yum and add the CASA Linux repository information.
To set up yum to install CASA for Linux, first fetch
bootstrap.linux and make it executable by executing the following commands from the command line of a Linux terminal window:
wget http://svn.cv.nrao.edu/casa/bootstrap.linux chmod 755 bootstrap.linux
To do the next part, you either have to be able to log in as
root or be have permissions to use
sudo
. If you have the root password for your machine, do the following from the command line (entering the
root password when prompted):
su ./bootstrap.linux yum install casapy
If you have
sudo
permissions, execute the following from the command line (entering
your password when prompted):
sudo ./bootstrap.linux sudo yum install casapy
From this point on, you no longer need
bootstrap.linux on the system on which you just installed CASA. Whenever you want to update to the most recent released version of CASA, either log in as root or use
sudo
to run:
yum update casapy
from the command line of a Linux terminal window.
--
DarrellSchiebel - 2009-06-17