The first step in the installation procedure is to identify the operating system and corresponding SAS release. SAS is supplied as a single tar.gz archive. Help on how to download SAS can be found at the SAS download web page:
http://xmm.esac.esa.int/sas/current/download/
This page provides a table showing the different builds and supported Operating Systems available for each SAS release. In addition, for each SAS version, the source code for all the SAS packages is available through a single tar.gz archive. Once the tar.gz archive corresponding to a given SAS release has been downloaded, the installation process is quite straightforward and platform independent. Detailed installation instructions can be found at:
http://xmm.esac.esa.int/sas/current/installation/
It is recommended to install SAS in a publicly accessible directory on the system, (which will be referred here as /top_dir). Once such a directory has been selected, the SAS tar.gz archive should be unpacked there. The unpacking provides, among other files, a script named install.sh, which must be executed to perform the installation. Once the installation is complete, the correspondent SAS release will be located in a subdirectory named:
xmmsas_YYYYMMDD_HHMM
which identifies uniquely each SAS release by the date (YYYYMMDD) and time (HHMM) of its production. In SAS terms, this is referred to as the XMM-Newton SAS Release Manifest [7].
The installation script will produce two additional shell scripts within the same directory, named setsas.sh and setsas.csh for the Bourne/Bash/Korn shells and csh/tcsh shells respectively. The purpose of these scripts is to initialize the SAS environment for each particular shell.
The install.sh script also makes some additional sanity checks on the installation environment, like for example, check for the correct location of the perl binary (or a soft link to it) in the /usr/local/bin directory, which is required to run some SAS perl procedures. See the following link for more information on any additional requirements:
http://xmm.esac.esa.int/sas/current/requirements/