WARNING: chips is not supported in CIAO 4.12+, falling back to matplotlib.

When you start Sherpa you may see the following warning message:

WARNING: chips is not supported in CIAO 4.12+, falling back to matplotlib.
WARNING: Please consider updating your $HOME/.sherpa.rc file to suppress this warning.

You can still use Sherpa, and it will create plots with Matplotlib, but the warning will be displayed each time you start Sherpa until you change your Sherpa configuration file.

Change the plot_pkg line in your $HOME/.sherpa.rc file (which can be edited with your favorite text editor) so that it is set to pylab - for example:

unix% grep plot_pkg $HOME/.sherpa.rc
plot_pkg   : pylab