20000302: McIDAS-X installation at CCNY

>From: "Ka Kit Lai" <address@hidden>
>Organization: CCNY
>Keywords:  200003021618.JAA05139 McIDAS setup

Ka,

>This is Ka Kit from CCNY. I know steve has already sent you a message 
>about the new Mcidas that has installed on halo. The Mcidas is running 
>without any problem, and now we need the followings thing on Mcidas:
>
>1) We need have the F-key menu on Mcidas.

I saw this in your previous email and logged in yesterday to set things
up.  What I found was that the .cshrc file for the wxnut user sourced
a global cshrc file (/var/eas/Cshrc.Global), and it, in turn, source a global 
login file (/var/eas/Login.Enviroment).  The
problems you were seeing with the new installation (presumably for the
wxnut account) was caused by incorrect entries in the global login
file.  I edited this file and setup the McIDAS environment variables
the way they should be.  You will now see that this file looks like:

# Mcidas Settings
# setenv McINST_ROOT /mcidas
# setenv MCDATA /mcidas/workdata
if ( ! ${?MCPATH} ) then
setenv MCDATA ~`whoami`/mcidas/data
setenv MCPATH ${MCDATA}:/home/mcidas/data:/home/mcidas/help
setenv MCGUI /home/mcidas/bin
setenv MCTABLE_READ "${MCDATA}/MCTABLE.TXT;/home/mcidas/data/ADDESITE.TXT"
setenv MCTABLE_WRITE "${MCDATA}/MCTABLE.TXT"
endif

I started a McIDAS-X session as wxnut after making these modifications
and everything worked as it should.

>2) Mcidas needs to be able to display text file.

McIDAS-XCD had been built, installed, and configured but not turned on.
I was under the impression that CCNY was switching to use of GEMPAK/GARP
and that McIDAS was not going to be used anymore.  Since this request
indicates that you do want to use McIDAS, I turned on XCD as follows:

o uncommented 'exec xcd_run MONITOR' in ~ldm/ldmd.conf
o uncommented textual data processing (DDPLUS|IDS ... xcd_run DDS lines)
  in pqact.conf
o stopped and restarted the LDM

When I logged off yesterday afternoon, XCD was running normally and McIDAS
files were being created.  The "text" display should be working normally
(we were uncertain about exactly what you meant by "text"; I assumed
that you meant real text access and the ability to plot/contour data
in McIDAS MDXX files).

>3) We also need to have the help file install so that we know all the    
>commands that is available.

The reason that the online help was not showing up was the incorrect settings
in the global login file.  They should work fine now.

>Prof. Hindman need the Mcidas with the F-key menu to be ready on March 9.

It should work fine now.  If it doesn't, please let me know by the end
of the day.  Also, if it is not working, please let me know which user
it is not working for (it always worked for the user 'mcidas').

>I 
>really appreciate all the help from you and other technicians from Unidata. 
>Thank you very much.

You are welcome.

We intend to send a more detailed list of what we did on halo.  This will
be useful for whoever gets the responsibility for maintaining and updating
the machine in the future.

Tom
--
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
* Tom Yoksas                                             UCAR Unidata Program *
* (303) 497-8642 (last resort)                                  P.O. Box 3000 *
* address@hidden                                   Boulder, CO 80307 *
* Unidata WWW Service                             http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/*
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+