SAOImage DS9 Known Issues

12-15-2008 MacOSX Open vs. SAOImage\ DS9.app\Contents\MacOS\ds9

When opening MacOSX DS9 from the command line, it is better to use the OPEN application as opposed to specifying the binary directly:

# good
% open /Applications/SAOImage\ DS9.app foo.fits

# bad
% /Applications/SAOImage\ DS9.app/Contents/MacOS/ds9 bar.fits

5-15-2008 IRAF and imexamine

The task imexamine can not be used with frame numbers greater than 9.

2-21-2008 MacOSX PATH environment variable

When you double click on a MacOSX application, it does not parse any shell startup files, such as ~/.profile.  Instead, the environment is defined using a special environment file, .MacOSX/environment.plist. This file can be created with the MacOSX utility /Developer/Applications/PropertyListEditor.app. For further information, please click here.

12-18-2007 Windows Vista installation

Vista has new restrictions on who can write into the Program Files folder, which is exactly what DS9 tries to do. Please install DS9 as the Administrator. This can be done easily after downloading the DS9 .exe setup file by right-clicking on the file in the Downloads Box, and then choosing "Open containing folder".  Right-clicking on the zipped .exe file will allow you to "Run as administrator".  Alternatively, you can change the security level of the Program Files folder or install in another location, such as the users Desktop. For more information please click here.

7-31-2007 Darwin

Darwin requires the use of X11 for MacOSX 10.4 or higher. For  information on using SAOImage DS9 with IRAF under MacOSX, please see The Macintosh IRAF Web Page

6-9-2005 Linux GNOME and KDE

An issue concerning Linux GNOME and KDE, animated cursors and X windows resources has come to our attention. There is a bug within the X11 server in which memory is not freed properly if your window manager uses animated cursors (the watch / hour glass cursor for example). In this case, a small amount of memory is allocated and not freed each time DS9 changes the cursor to indicate that it is busy. While the amount of memory is quite small, it can accumulate over time. For example, if you where to pan, zoom, and rotate an image over 200 times, the amount of memory involved becomes quite large and can lead to instability with the X windows server.

The work-around involves setting the X windows resources database to enforce the use of standard, non animated cursors:

$ xrdb -merge
Xcursor.theme_core: false
Xcursor.core: true
<cntrl-D>


or set these resources in your .Xresources or .Xdefaults file.

6-29-2004 Plot

In certain cases when the data contains x errorbars, and there values are quite large, compared to the data itself, and if displayed with errorbar style 2, the rendering may become corrupted. In this case, only use style 1.

6-29-2004 IRAF

DS9 now supports IRAF's new IIS image display protocol. However, there is one minor problem with the mscred task msczero. Before using msczero, issue the following command in the cl:

cl> set disable_wcs_maps=""
cl> flpr