SAOImage DS9 Known Issues

Windows Vista

Vista has new restrictions on who can write into the Program Files folder, which is exactly what DS9 wants to do. Please install DS9 as the Administrator, or install after changing the security level of the Program Files folder. For more information please click here.

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.

Darwin

Darwin requires the use of X11 for MacOSX 10.4 or higher. 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