KARMA: Download and Installation

Please note that all versions of the KARMA software includes a dedicated version of the RTD executable. It will not interfere with any other installation(s) of the tool on your system.

Installing KARMA

KARMA is available via Apptainer containers (for Intel Linux), package managers (MacPorts, RPM/yum/dnf & apt) from the ESO Mac & Linux Software repositories for some OS+Hardware combinations or via binary distribution tar.gz file for several different hardware platforms.

KARMA version 2.8 (the latest) is available via the following installation methods:

macOS

KARMA-2.8 is now (as of Phase-2 for SM for P116) available on macOS via MacPorts for both Intel and Apple Silicon, via the eops_macports github project. Please follow the instructions in the README.

Linux

We are unable to compile and run KARMA via RPMs in Fedora beyond Fedora-32. Using the Fedora-32 RPM we have managed to make Ubuntu packages for Ubuntu releases up to 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish). We have therefore decided to provide KARMA Apptainer containers based on the Fedora-32 KARMA-2.8 RPMS which should allow KARMA to be run on any Linux installation where Apptainer can be installed. Apptainer is thus now the recommended install method for KARMA for all 'modern' Linux versions and distributions (compatible with Apptainer). Apptainer even seems to be available for CentOS-7, so it can (probably) even be used there (though we have not as yet tested that).

The exisiting RPM and Ubuntu package repositories will remain available for the forseeable future so you can still use those packages your distribution & version happen to still be available, but they will no longer be updated.

Apptainer

Instructions for installing KARMA via Apptainer are available in the Apptainer containers for Observation Preparation Software knowledgebase article.

ESO Mac & Linux software repositories

To install the relevant repository, please follow the relevant instructions at ESO Mac & Linux software repositories, in the final instruction for each OS/distribution replace the generic <package_name> with eso-karma. i.e. one of the following, as appropriate for your OS/distribution:

sudo dnf install eso-karma
sudo yum install eso-karma
sudo apt-get install eso-karma

Once installed, see the instructions for use here.

Building and installing KARMA from the source distribution

Installation from source code is currently not supported due to licencing issues. We hope to have a new version of KARMA available, including source code soon.

Running KARMA

Assuming that you have successfully installed KARMA, you can now start the tool with 'karma' if it is in your path, or using the absolute path: <karma-dest-dir>/bin/karma or /usr/bin/karma on Linux if you installed from the repositories or /opt/local/bin/karma if you installed on Mac from the repository.

For more information about how to install and use the tool to prepare your observations, check out the KARMA User Manual.

Instrument selector

This page is specific to KMOS.