External Software Requirements

Tools required to work with SAS

To work with SAS you will need to install some additional tools. The following Table provides the list of these applications and the versions we recommend to install.

Name	Version	Download web page	Comments
ds9	7.2	Binaries available from ds9 web site.	xpa 2.1.14 is included with ds9.
Grace	5.1.22	Only source code is available from Grace web site.	Mac OS X and most Linux distributions provide a binary package ready to be installed.
Heasoft	6.13	Binaries and source code available from Heasoft web site.	A binary installation is sufficient to work with SAS.
WCSTools	3.8.7	Only source code is available from WCSTools web site.	New requirement starting with SAS 13.0.0. Very easy to build from source code.

Perl configuration

Some SAS tasks are in fact perl scripts, e.g emchain, epchain, omichain, etc. They require that perl be installed in your system and be available as either a real binary or as soft link in /usr/local/bin. This is the default setting that is hard coded in the first line of all SAS perl scripts. However, the SAS installation script configure_install is instructed to look in specific system directories for valid perl binaries and to replace, if necessary, the default setting in all SAS perl scripts.

As described in the installation procedure, the configure_install script can set the perl to be used by defining the SAS_PERL environment variable to point to the absolute path of a valid perl binary. Alternately, the configure_install will look for a valid perl binary in /usr/local/bin,/usr/bin/perl, /opt/local/bin and /sw/bin. If none is found, the script warns the user and aborts the installation. Once perl has been installed, the user must run again the configure_install script, to complete the installation.

X11 on Mac OS X

To work with SAS on Mac OS X you need to have installed the X Windows or X11 software. Until Mac OS X Lion this was included in the installation DVD under the subdirectory of Optional Installs, under Applications. However, Mountain Lion does not include X11 but you can get it from the XQuartz project web site. You should use XQuartz version 2.7.2 or later.

Alternately, you may install X11 from Fink. We recommend to read this document on how to run X11 on Apple's Mac OS X. The document includes links to install X11 on Mac OS X.

Another useful document on how to install X11 is provided by MacPorts X11.