CIAO "Watch Out" Page

This page lists noteworthy items and issues about the CIAO 4.0 release. For the full list of known issues please review the:

• CIAO bug list
• CIAO Frequently Asked Questions page
• CXC HelpDesk

Mac OS X platforms: FITS table file writing slowness with NFS-mounted disks

FITS table file writing through the CXC Data Model slows by a significant factor on Mac OS X machines - both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) - when the data is accessed via a networked file system (NFS) mount. This issue does not affect Solaris or Linux platforms.

The bug page for the NFS-mounted disk issue has details and workarounds.

Installing & Starting CIAO

Solaris: Untarring the CIAO Software

Solaris users must use GNU tar to unpack the tarfiles. If native Solaris tar is used, some of the smoketest filenames will be truncated.

Python Packaged with CIAO OTS

CIAO 4.0 uses the Python software packaged in the CIAO OTS directory for the Sherpa and ChIPS applications. In the window where CIAO is sourced any other Python installation is overwritten: this may interfere with other Python applications on the user's system. At present, the workaround is to run CIAO in a separate window from other Python applications. The CXC is working to resolve this issue.

IPython Packaged with CIAO OTS

CIAO 4.0 includes IPython 0.8 in the CIAO OTS directory which is used by Sherpa and ChIPS to provide command-line user interfaces. These programs create an IPython profile in the directory $HOME/.ipython-ciao.

If IPython users want any personal customizations to be available when running CIAO, they will have to copy them from $HOME/.ipython to $HOME/.ipython-ciao.

New Local Parameter File Directory

The CIAO 4.0 software establishes a separate local parameter file directory, ~/cxcds_param4. This allows users to run both CIAO 3.4 and CIAO 4.0 without having to worry about parameter file conflicts.

The Switching between CIAO 3.4 and CIAO 4.0 section of the Starting CIAO thread has more information.

General

Source Detection and Cosmic-Ray Afterglows

CIAO users who are trying to detect sources of about 10 counts or less should be aware of potential confusion with cosmic-ray afterglows that have not been removed from the data.

The Cosmic-Ray Afterglows why topic explains the limitations of the current tools and describes analysis tips to help eliminate more of the afterglows.

wavdetect bugs

Three significant issues have been identified in the CIAO 4.0 version of wavdetect. Refer to the bug page for details:

• The falsesrc parameter should be left at the default value
• The lower limit on the sigthresh value is 1e-8
• Limitations in the PSF information

Incorrect Exposure Time from Merged Event Files

When multiple event files that have different ranges of exposure numbers (expno column) are merged, the output file will have more than one GTI block for each chip. This causes incorrect exposure values later in the analysis, as the CIAO tools cannot use multiple GTI blocks for a single chip.

Further details and a workaround to this problem are available on the dmmerge bug page.

Linking External Software Against CIAO (Mac OS X Intel and PPC)

The CXC libraries libpix.dylib, libds.dylib, cxcparam.dylib, and libNewHdr2.dylib have dependencies on libreadline and libhistory that are hardwired to CXC library files.

To link external software against these libraries, add:

-L<location of CIAO>/ots/lib -lreadline -lhistory

to the link lines. The linking issue will be fixed in the next CIAO release.

Conflicts with Other Software Packages

There are some known conflicts between CIAO and other software or system libraries and tools. Issues not covered in this "Watch Out" page are listed on the "Other Software Packages" bug page.

Colden on Mac OS X Intel

Command-line version of COLDEN does not work

The command-line version of COLDEN gives incorrect results on Mac OS-X Intel machines and should not be used.

Users on this platform should run COLDEN through the web interface instead.