Installation of the astronomy software CASA in Ubuntu 16.04

I'm trying to install CASA in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (this software can be found here). It's only been tested for Red Hat but it's supposed to work in Ubuntu as well. I'm quite new to Linux and so I don't know exactly what I should do, since I'm only familiar with installations that can be done using sudo apt-get install in the terminal.

The version I need is 4.7.0. Should I download the tar.gz file? And if so, what needs to be done afterwards? I can only think of unpacking the file using:

tar -xvzf name_of_the_file.tar.gz

But is this enough to complete the installation? I've tried this, but apparently it's not working, because if I run a Python script that uses CASA, it crashes and says the CASA commands "are not defined" (probably it's not installed correctly).

3

1 Answer

The binaries are precompiled, so you just need to unpack the tarball and you can then run casa directly in the terminal.

cd Downloads
tar xfzv casa*
cd casa-*el7/bin
./casa

It will create a directory ~/.casa and update with its config, then start the program.

If you want to make using it regularly more efficient, you can add the directory where the binary is located to your path, or make a symlink to it in a path location. For example, if you left it in Downloads (you might prefer to move it somewhere else), you could do something like:

sudo ln -s $HOME/Downloads/casa-release-4.7.2-el7/bin/casa /usr/local/bin/casa

Then you could run it from anywhere just by typing casa.

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