Downloading CIAO 4.14 and CALDB 4.10.7

Please be aware of the following issues before installing CIAO 4.14 (see the watchout page for more information):

• Classic CIAO 4.14 only supports Python 3.8

• macOS users must install recent versions of XQuartz and XCode.

• CIAO 4.14 does not support 32-bit Linux, CentOS6, or macOS High Sierra (10.13) and earlier.

• Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file can be ignored as long as the test reports PASS.

Verify conda version. Users should be using conda version 4.7.6 or newer.

$ conda --version
conda 4.8.3

If conda is not installed,

$ conda --version
conda: Command not found.

users can install miniconda from the Anaconda website.

Installation on Apple Silicon Systems

Users of Apple Silicon-based systems (M1, M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, and M2) should use the x86-64 MacOS distribution of Conda. The mid-May 2022 release of Anaconda introduced a native Apple Silicon ARM64 distribution which is incompatible with the current Conda CIAO distribution. Attempts to install via conda create will fail to complete.

Install CIAO into a new conda environment.

CIAO 4.14 requires conda-forge channel

Updating to the latest version of XSpec requires CIAO to use a newer version of libgfortran, which is not available in the default channel.

Therefore users will need to include the conda-forge channel when they install CIAO 4.14. Because of this, users are encouraged to create a new conda environment for CIAO 4.14 rather than trying to upgrade an existing environment.

$ conda create -n ciao-4.14 \
  -c https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao \
  -c conda-forge \
  ciao sherpa ds9 ciao-contrib caldb_main marx

CIAO-4.14 is available with Python 3.9, 3.8, or 3.7. The default will be determined based on the other packages available on conda-forge channel at the time of installation. To request a specific version, add python=3.7, python=3.8, or python=3.9 to the conda create line.

Users may also wish to includes packages such as jupyter, astropy, and scipy into their new CIAO conda environment. The caldb_main package is the base CalDB, while the additional background files are contained in the acis_bkg_evt and hrc_bkg_evt packages. The caldb package is the entire CalDB which can be used in lieu of the three previously mentioned CalDB packages.

Problems with matplotlib v3.2

There are known issues with multi-threaded processing on the Mac with matplotlib version 3.2. conda may select this version if it is already in your conda cache. If so, then you should force conda to install a newer version:

$ conda create -n ciao-4.14 \
  -c https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao \
  -c conda-forge \
  ciao sherpa ds9 ciao-contrib caldb_main marx "matplotlib>=3.3.0"

The quotation marks needed to escape the ">" sign. This will also change the default python version to 3.9.

Problem with downloading XSPEC models or CALDB

Users experiencing problems downloading the CALDB files and/or the XSPEC model files can follow the Alternative download instructions.

Activate the CIAO environment

tcsh% conda activate ciao-4.14
  or
bash$ source activate ciao-4.14

By default, the terminal prompt will change to show the currently active conda environment. Users can also run the ciaover command to verify that they are setup correctly.

# packages in environment at /export/miniconda/envs/ciao-4.14:
#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
ciao                      4.14.0           py38h59af02c_0    https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao
ciao-contrib              4.14.4                     py_0    https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao
ds9                       8.3                           1    https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao
sherpa                    4.14.0           py38h3fd9d12_0    https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao

System information:
Linux is_awesome.cfa.harvard.edu 3.10.0-1062.12.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Feb 4 23:02:59 UTC 2020 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Users may want to create an alias so that they only need to type ciao to activate their environment.

MARX setup

If you installed marx and are going to be using the simulate_psf script then you should

$ conda env config vars set MARX_ROOT=$CONDA_PREFIX

This command only needs to be run once. Or if you are going to be using marx directly then you can find the parameter files in the

$CONDA_PREFIX/share/marx/pfiles

directory.

$ cd $ASCDS_INSTALL/test
$ make

If there are any errors reported during the smoke tests, users can check the smoke test bugs page for possible solutions.