Prerequisites

• A Unix platform, including OS X and Cygwin.
• GCC 3.3 or greater (note that 4.0.0 is a buggy release that breaks Synthetic LISA, but 4.0.1 is OK). If you don't have it, you can get it from http://gcc.gnu.org; on Mac OS X, get the XCode tools from http://developer.apple.com/tools.
• Subversion (SVN). Try which svn: if you don't have it, you can get it at http://subversion.tigris.org (on Mac OS X, use the installer package found at http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo).
• Python 2.4 or greater. Try python (and exit with CTRL-D): if you don't have it, get it from http://www.python.org.

Subversion installation and usage

This is how things will work. Using Subversion (SVN), you will download the latest version of the lisatools software onto your computer; we will call the resulting lisatools directory the SVN directory. Using the script master-install.py, you will compile and install the lisatools library in a separate directory on your computer; we will call this the installation directory. For instance, you may download the software into $HOME/source/lisatools and then install it into $HOME, which will actually put files in $HOME/lib, $HOME/bin, and so on. (In Unix, $HOME is an environment variable that contains the name of your home directory, typically /home/username, or on OS X /Users/username.)

To get the Subversion archive, use a shell and cd to where we want the SVN directory to be placed (for instance, $HOME/source), and then run

svn checkout http://lisatools.googlecode.com/svn/ lisatools

Here co stands for "checkout". Inside the SVN directory, you can use the SVN commands described at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/index.html. The most important are

• svn update, which will update all files in the directory to the latest repository version; the command will print a list of updated files prefixed by "U" (or added files prefixed by "A"); if you see "G", the changes in the repository version were successfully merged with the changes you had made to the file in the meantime; if you see "C", the changes were incompatible, and more work is needed to harmonize the versions (see http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/index.html)
• svn status -u, which will show you which files have newer versions in the repository, and which you have modified locally ("M"); files prefixed by "?" are local files that are not in the repository (and perhaps should not be, such as .xml working files)
• svn commit -m "Your commit message" filetocommit, which will commit your modified version of committedfile to the SVN repository, making a note of the commit message
• svn add filetoadd or svn add directorytoadd, to add a file or directory to the repository; the addition is not final until you issue an svn commit for the same file or directory
• svn del filetodelete or svn del directorytodelete, to delete a file or directory; again, you need to follow this up with svn commit

Installation

We're almost ready to install lisatools. First though we need to set a few environment variables. Say $SVNDIR is the SVN directory (say, $HOME/source/lisatools), and $LISATOOLS is the installation directory (say, $HOME). Then $LISATOOLS/bin and $SVNDIR/MLDCpipelines2/bin must be added to the $PATH, while $LISATOOLS/lib/python2.X/site-packages must be added to $PYTHONPATH (where python2.X is your python, such as python2.4). For instance, with bash, do

export SVNDIR=$HOME/source/lisatools
export LISATOOLS=$HOME
export PATH=$SVNDIR/MLDCpipelines2/bin:$LISATOOLS/bin:$PATH
export PYTHONPATH=$LISATOOLS/lib/python2.5/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH

while with tcsh, do

setenv SVNDIR $HOME/source/lisatools
setenv LISATOOLS $HOME
setenv PATH $SVNDIR/MLDCpipelines2/bin:$LISATOOLS/bin:$PATH
setenv PYTHONPATH $LISATOOLS/lib/python2.5/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH

These paths need to be set before installing, and before using lisatools. You can add them to your .profile or .tcshrc.

Great! We’re all set. Now cd into $SVNDIR, and run

python master-install.py --prefix=$LISATOOLS

This will install the lisatools libraries and packages; it will also look for a number of standard Python libraries, and install recent versions if they are not found. These are

• numpy (a Python array library)
• pyRXP (a Python XML library)
• SWIG (a C/Python interface generator)

Another thing: the generation of the Challenge 2 and 3 Galaxies requires big seed catalogs (hundreds of Mb), than can be downloaded by master-install.py (once and for all) if you specify the option --downloadgalaxy.

You should be all set! If something went wrong, the script will complain and hopefully suggest a solution. If not, file an "Issues" report.

Updating lisatools

To get the lisatools installation up to the latest revision, run svn update in $SVNDIR, and then python master-install.py --prefix=$LISATOOLS. Don't forget the second step!

A note on Cygwin

LISAtools works under Cygwin (well, it was last tried under version 1.5.24-2 on Windows XP). You must include the following additional packages in the Cygwin setup (I include the versions I tried, but anything newer would probably still work):

• Python (2.4.3-1)
• Subversion (1.4.2-1)
• openssh (4.5p1-1)
• SWIG (1.3.29-2)
• gcc (3.4.4-3, this may not be needed since mingw is the standard compiler)
• patchutils (0.2.31-1)
• make (3.81-1)