Getting Started in CASA

Installing CASA

See the CASA Primer for installation instructions for common OSs.

Installing CASA on Ubuntu

The following method worked for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).

• Download the tarball appropriate for your Linux distribution (from https://svn.cv.nrao.edu/casa/linux_distro/).
  • 32-bit Linux
  • 64-bit Linux
• Install to /usr/local/bin/CASA (or substitute your own directory).

sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin/CASA
sudo mv casapy-30.0.9860-001-64b.tar.gz /usr/local/bin/CASA # this is for 64-bit installation; substitute the appropriate tarball here
cd /usr/local/bin/CASA
sudo tar zxvf casapy-30.0.9860-001-64b.tar.gz

• Add the following environment variable to your .bashrc (or the equivalent command for your preferred shell startup script).

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/CASA/casapy-30.0.9860-001-64b

• Test it out!

source ~/.bashrc # or open a new terminal
casapy

Starting CASA

Once installed, you can start CASA using the command "casapy"

## From a UNIX shell prompt
casapy

Note that, by convention, UNIX-level commands will be commented out so to facilitate parsing these pages into CASA scripts.

Listing Available Commands and Tools

# From within CASA
tasklist()

A more exhaustive summary can be obtained as follows.

taskhelp

Some commands are hidden away as methods under various objects. For example, to take a look at options under the imager object

help im

Notice that the method mem appears here, under help, but not under tasklist.

Getting Help on a Command

Let's get some exhaustive help on clean.

# From within CASA
help clean

This method is OK, and perhaps the following method is better.

# From within CASA
pdoc clean

Additional Tips

• When you started CASA, it gave you a lot of useful information. But now you've been mucking around for a while, and that info is lost. How do you get it back? Just rerun the startup screen.

startup

--Jack Gallimore 14:42, 30 October 2009 (UTC)