20020819: McIDAS-X v2002 installation at CCNY

>From: "Kwan-yin Kong" <address@hidden>
>Organization: CCNY
>Keywords: 200208192102.g7JL2aK06690 McIDAS-X

Kway-yin,

>Hello.  This message is from Kwan-yin Kong at the 
>City College of New York.

Hi Kway-yin.  I hope your trip back to CCNY was a good one.

>Over the past few weeks, we 
>have been attempting to set up a replacement machine 
>(Halo) for the purpose of running LDM, McIDAS, and GEMPAK. 
>After recommendations from Tom Yoksas (email message dated 
>back in April of 2002), the replacement machine purchased 
>is a DELL PowerEdge 2500 with dual i86PC processors and 
>1GB of RAM.  The operating system installed on Halo is 
>Solaris version 8 (by our sys admin: Xiaodong Yan).

This sounds like a very good machine.  It should serve you well.

>Since last week, I have been attempting to 
>install and configure McIDAS2002 on Halo.  The McIDAS 
>source codes were compiled using the gcc and g77 
>compilers, and the compilations appeared to run through 
>successfully.  When I got to the initial test phase, a few 
>errors/anomalies surfaced.  First, after setting up the 
>environment variables as listed on the McIDAS test 
>web-page, and ran 'mcidasx', both the graphics and command 
>line screens appeared.  However, the following error 
>messages appeared in the command line window.
>
>============================================================
>mcimage: Unknown options: -addeCompress TRUE -addeTimeout 
>120
>mcimage: Couldn't get enough colors; using private 
>colormap
>mcimage: To run GUI, you must restart McIDAS with few 
>colors
>mcimage: so it doen't require a private colormap
>============================================================

There are two comments I can make here:

The mcimage complaint about unknown options are to be expected.
The are additions that I make to the .mcidasrc file through
my GUI startup of McIDAS (mcstart.gui).  You can safely ignore
these messages.  I must say, however, that I am suprised that
you got these messages on a brand new McIDAS installation.  You
only get these when the ~mcidas/.mcidasrc file already exists.

The second message is telling us that the color depth of the
X window session is 8-bit.  You will want to run this at 24-bit
to get the most out of McIDAS.  If you plan to run GEMPAK sessions
on the console of the same machine, you will have to do more
work to get them to run since GEMPAK does not run in a 24-bit
X display directly.

>In addition, there was no status bar (or it could not be 
>seen) above the command prompt (The blue blinking command 
>prompt did appear, however).

It was there, but probably all rendered in black since you
did not have enough colors in which to run (same complaint
from mcimage as above: couldn't get enough colors).

>I was able to type in the 
>rest of the test commands as listed on the web page, and 
>all commands successfully ran through (i.e. displaying 
>nine panels in the graphics window, drawing a map in the 
>center frame, setting up the topo map as an ADDE dataset, 
>displaying the topo map in panel 9, drawing a map on top 
>and erasing the image portion of the panel).  The image 
>colors of the topo map appeared to be good!

This confirms the comment about not enough colors.  As soon
as you reconfigure X to run in 24-bit mode, every thing will
run correctly.

>Next, I ran 'mcidas config' to run McIDAS GUI. 
>What I saw was a similar list of error messages 
>regarding the color map in the UNIX terminal window as 
>shown below. The content of .tcshrc is also shown further 
>below for your reference.
>
>============================================================
><-mcidas-> mcidas Error in startup script: Warning: Cannot 
>allocate colormap entry for "green4"
>Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "blue4"
>Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "magenta4"
>Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "cyan4"
>Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "red4"
>Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "yellow4"
>         while executing
>"close $fhandle"
>         (procedure "startMcidas" line 34)
>         invoked from within
>"startMcidas $optn"
>         ("0" arm line 2)
>         invoked from within
>"switch $argc {
>           0 {
>              startMcidas $optn
>           }
>           1 {
>               if { !([string match "config*" $optn] ||
>                      [string mat..."
>         (file "/usr/mcidas/bin/mcidas" line 630)
><-mcidas->
>============================================================

Again, the same comment about not having enough colors applies.

What you need to do now is:

o logout
o when you get the login window, you will want to click on the
  options button to get a drop down list
o choose Command Line Login from the list
o login as 'root'
o run 'kdmconfig'

kdmconfig will allow you to change system settings including those
related to the display.  You will want to change the X window depth
from 8-bit to 24-bit.  After making the changes, Solaris will test
what you selected and tell you if the settings were OK for the 
hardware that you have.  When you have entered everything correctly,
you will exit saving changes and then X will get restarted and
the login screen will reappear.  Now, when you try running the
McIDAS tests you should be OK.

>Content of .tschrc appears below

Since the problem is not related to settings in your C shell defaults
file, .cshrc, there is nothing to be learned from it.

>set path = (/usr/mcidas/bin /usr/bin . /usr/dt/bin 
>/usr/openwin/bin /bin /usr/local/bin /usr/ucb 
>/usr/ccs/bin)
>setenv CC gcc
>setenv CPPFLAGS "-DNDEBUG -Df2cFortran"
>setenv FC g77
>setenv FFLAGS "-O -Wuninitialized -fno-automatic"
>setenv CXX
>
># Below is C-shell environment variable definitions for 
>the user 'mcidas'
>
># umask
>umask 002
>
># MCHOME and McINST_ROOT
>setenv MCHOME $HOME
>setenv McINST_ROOT $MCHOME
>
># NOTE: conditional definition is only needed for C-shell 
>users
>if ( ! ${?MCPATH} ) then
>       setenv MCDATA $MCHOME/workdata
>       setenv MCPATH ${MCDATA}:$MCHOME/data:$MCHOME/help
>       setenv MCGUI $MCHOME/bin
>       setenv MCTABLE_READ 
>"${MCDATA}/MCTABLE.TXT;$MCHOME/data/ADDESITE.TXT"
>       setenv MCTABLE_WRITE "$MCHOME/data/ADDESITE.TXT"
>       setenv XCD_disp_file $MCDATA/DECOSTAT.DAT
>       if ( ! ${?path} ) then
>         set path=$MCGUI
>       else
>         set path=(${MCGUI} $path)
>       endif
>endif
>
># Limit ADDE transfers to compressed ones
>setenv MCCOMPRESS TRUE
>
>============================================================
>
>These are the errors I have encountered so far.  Thanks in 
>advance for helping us.

You are welcome.  Again, as soon as you restart X with 24-bit color
depth, everything will work fine.

Tom

>From address@hidden Tue Aug 20 16:46:07 2002
>Subject: Re: 20020819: McIDAS-X v2002 installation at CCNY 

Tom:

      After configuring the display using 'kdmconfig', 
McIDAS is now running without errors.  Professor Hindman 
saw the end results and was quite impressed.  He wants to 
give you big THANKS for your help.

Kwan-yin Kong