SAOImage DS9 Known Issues

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.

RH Fedora Core 3

Several issues concerning Fedora Core 3 have come to our attention:

DS9 fails when invoked via OpenSSH

From the OpenSSH FAQ:
3.13 - I upgraded to OpenSSH 3.8 and some X11 programs stopped working.

As documented in the 3.8 release notes, ssh will now use untrusted X11 cookies by default. The previous behavior can be restored by setting ForwardX11Trusted yes in ssh_config.

Possible symptoms include:
BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)
X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 20 (X_GetProperty)
You now need to use the -Y switch (trusted X forwarding) to get ds9 to work when you use ssh. This will give the same level of X forwarding as -X did in the previous release.

$ ssh -Y remotehost

DS9 runs very slowly or crashes in some non-English language environments

We have traced the problem of ds9 running very slowly in some non-English language environments under Fedora Core3 to delayed interaction between the X server and the service that implements the new Intranet/Internet Input Method Framework (IIIMF). Until a more permanent solution is available, we offer a simple work-around. You only need to set the LANG variable on the command line when running ds9:

% env LANG=POSIX ds9

MacOSX and Darwin

MacOSX and Darwin requires the use of X11 for MacOSX 10.3 and 10.4.

For  information on using SAOImage DS9 with IRAF under MacOSX, please see The Macintosh IRAF Web Page

Plot

There is a know bug with Plots and the Zoom function. Bring up an analysis plot. Click left button to start the zoom function. Without completing zoom (by clicking a button), go to FileClose.  Resulting error message will appear:  An internal error has been detected: invalid command line:".atmenu122g" menu and choose.

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.

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