SAS watchout page

Is it possible to use SAS 6.5 under a Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger)?

In principle it is possible, but you might encounter problems:

The only officially supported Mac OSX version is the 10.2. The reason is that the XMM-Newton SOC are so far short on Mac hardware. We try to support as many Mac users as possible, therefore build on this rather "old" OSX version. This should be OK in the general case (running binaries produced with an older OS on a newer OS). The OSX 10.2 binaries can be used with OSX 10.3 (this has been tested by the SOC with good results). The SOC can offer also some support to users running SAS on this platform (we have a machine under OSX 10.3 used for testing purposes).

The same Mac binaries have been tested on a Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) platform by our colleagues in the XMM-Newton Support Facility of NASA's Goddard Flight Center in the framework of the SAS 6.5 Scientific Validation. According to the validation everything was OK, but a couple of months later problems were reported for one observation, by which the EPIC data reduction seems to produce far fewer events than when using another platform for the same data reduction.

While we are waiting for a thorough investigation and proper problem report by the GOF colleagues (we don't have access yet to any Tiger Mac), we would like to warn the SAS Mac users about this situation. As soon as it is clarified we will report through these pages.