To use our most recent shipboard ADCP processing software, you will need a recent version of Python
Python notes for various systems:
- Linux: you probably already have it; typical Linux distributions install it by default, and any that do not will at least have it available as an installable package.
- Solaris or Irix, then it may be up to your sysadmin to install Python, and you may need to prompt them to update whatever is there.
- OSX: Although a version is included with OSX, it is recommended that you install the version from python.org. It can coexist happily with the OSX-included version, allowing you to install whatever additional python packages you need without interfering with the system version.
- Windows: Again, install the version from python.org. Then download and install the Python Windows Extensions which adds the mechanism we use to communicate between python and Matlab.
Rich Pawlowicz wrote m_map, an excellent, free Matlab mapping toolbox that we use extensively. Although it is not required for ADCP processing, your editing plots will be fastly improved if you have it. Follow the instructions in Section 9 or 10 to install topography. You may have to fiddle with the default renderer (‘zbuffer’ or ‘painters’) to get topography to show up – perhaps different versions of matlab vary in how they treat patches?
We recommend using Postscript format (or Encapsulated Postscript) for saving Matlab plots. Free Postscript interpreters and viewers are readily available; again, Unix-like systems usually have them installed by default, but for Windows you will need to download both Ghostscript and GSView.
Unzip and Zip from InfoZip. These are excellent portable compression and archiving utilities. We use them for our software distribution. You probably already have either unzip or a Windows equivalent; if not, you can download and install them. Linux distributions may not install zip and unzip by default, but most likely include them.
Increasingly, we are using python with matplotlib and numpy/scipy instead of Matlab for data analysis and plotting.
If you use python–and you should–then install the IPython shell.
Mercurial is a nice distributed version control system that we are now using extensively. It is written in python. It is compact, easy to install, easy to use, and fast. Much of our software is available using mercurial, served on this web page: http://currents.soest.hawaii.edu/hg Follow this link to see how we advocate installation.
SCons (http://www.scons.org/) is the new build system that we are using for the core CODAS3 code, in place of makefiles. Like Mercurial, SCons is written in python.
Perl is an older scripting language that we have used extensively, but no longer use for new work, and have almost completely phased out. It is almost certainly installed on any Unix-like machine you might use. For Windows, try Perl from ActiveState. Better yet, skip Perl and go straight to Python.
If you can, just switch to Linux. Ubuntu makes is easy.
Cygwin from Cygnus (now RedHat) (Gnu port) Unix-style tools and environment for Windows, including a bash shell.
MinGW and MSYS are simpler alternatives to Cygwin; we use a version of the MinGW gcc compiler for compiling CODAS3 Windows binaries. See these instructions.
Miktex is an easy-to-install LaTeX (and full TeX, MetaFont, Dvips, etc) for Windows. Watch out for the A4 paper default in the dvips configuration file (dvips/config/local/config.ps).