39.1 Installing and Running fidlr3.0

fidlr3.0 is distributed with FLASH and is contained in the tools/fidlr3.0/ directory. These routines were written and tested using IDL v6.1 for Linux. They should work without difficulty on any UNIX machine with IDL installed--any functionality of fidlr3.0 under Windows is purely coincidental. Due to copyright difficulties with GIF files, output image files are in PNG or Postscript format. Most graphics packages, like xv or the GIMP, should be able to convert between PNG format and other commonly used formats.

Installation of fidlr3.0 requires defining some environment variables, making sure your IDL path is properly set, and compiling the support for HDF5 files. These procedures are described below.

39.1.1 Setting Up fidlr3.0Environment Variables

The FLASH fidlr3.0 routines are located in the tools/fidlr3.0/ subdirectory of the FLASH root directory. To use them you must set two environment variables. First set the value of XFLASH3_DIR to the location of the FLASH IDL routines; for example, under csh, use

setenv XFLASH3_DIR flash-root-path/tools/fidlr3.0

where flash-root-path is the absolute path of the FLASH3 root directory. This variable is used in the plotting routines to find the customized color table and setup parameters for xflash3.

Next, make sure that you have an IDL_DIR environment variable set. This should point to the directory in which the IDL distribution is installed. For example, if IDL is installed in idl-root-path, then you would define

setenv IDL_DIR idl-root-path .

Finally, you need to tell IDL where to find the fidlr3.0 routines. This is accomplished through the IDL_PATH environment variable

setenv IDL_PATH ${XFLASH3_DIR}:${IDL_DIR}:${IDL_DIR}/lib .

If you already have an IDL_PATH environment variable defined, just add XFLASH3_DIR to the beginning of it. You may wish to include these commands in your .cshrc (or the analogous versions in your .profile file, depending on your shell) to avoid having to reissue them every time you log in. It is important that the ${XFLASH3_DIR} come before the IDL directories in the path and that the ${IDL_DIR}/lib directory be included as well.

39.1.2 Running IDL

fidlr3.0 uses 8-bit color tables for all of its plotting. On displays with higher color depths, it may be necessary to use color overlays to get the proper colors on your display. For SGI machines, launching IDL with the start.pro script will enable 8-bit pseudocolor overlays. For Linux boxes, setting the X color depth to 24-bits per pixel and launching IDL with the start_linux.pro script usually produces proper colors.  

prompt> idl start_linux