KARMA: Download and Installation

Please note that all versions of the KARMA software includes a dedicated version of the SkyCat executable. It will not interfere with previous installations of the tool on your system.


Installing KARMA

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

We recommend using the package manager installations whenever possible.

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

Once installed, see the instructions for use here.

Installation from tarball

For a number of target platforms precompiled KARMA binary releases are available. Download the appropriate KARMA package from the following list:

You can determine the type of your hardware platform by typing: uname -m

  • After download you should have a gzipped tar file in your current directory. Unpack it by executing: tar fvxz karma_bin_<machine>_<os>_<version>.tar.gzThis will create a directory called karma_bin_<machine>_<os>_<version> with subdirectories bin, data, config and doc.
  • You may now remove the gzipped tar file: rm karma_bin_<machine>_<os>_<version>.tar.gz
  • The bin subdirectory of karma_bin_<machine>_<os>_<version> contains the single executable karma. If you don't want to call karma via its absolute path, you should include the bin subdirectory into your PATH environment variable.

  • 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.