Setting up molly

I have now simplified molly to make it easier for people to install (I hope). Mainly this has been a matter of eliminating NAG and switching from the old Figaro DSA library to NDF. This means that the external software should be much easier to get and install if you are not at a STARLINK site because you can use the STARLINK software store to get what you need. I have also altered the way the software is installed and I hope it should be more robust. You can also get STARLINK software on a cheap CDROM by the way.

Getting the molly software

To get molly, transfer over this gzipped tar file . Download it to an empty directory, gunzip and tar xvf it, or just tar xvfz it if you run GNU tar. It should create sub-directories F77 and C with various sub-directories inside them. Don't change these around unless you know what you are doing because the setup depends on their existence.

Before proceeding, there are various bits of other software that you will need. Get these ready first. If you are a STARLINK user you should be able to skip the next section, but look at it if you have problems with missing libraries during the link stage.

Other software

molly uses PGPLOT for graphics, NDF and FITSIO for some of its I/O and PDA for some numerical work.

PGPLOT is a graphics package written by T.Pearson at Caltech. Information on it and how to install it can be obtained from here.

PDA is a library developed by STARLINK to aid replacement of routines from the commercial NAG package. NAG is a good package but it costs money and so molly no longer uses NAG. If you are a STARLINK site, you will have PDA installed, if not I direct you to the STARLINK software store, from where it is easy to download.

FITSIO is the FITS package written by Bill Pence of HEASARC. As far as I know it is the same everywhere, but the version I use can be obtained again from STARLINK software store . Again this should be installed already if you are on STARLINK. In fact I advise getting this anyway because then you won't have to change anything to do with FITSIO in the Makefile.

NDF is a data format based on STARLINK's HDS system. It is the basis of many of STARLINK's packages such as Kappa and Portable Figaro. NDF has some very nice features. In molly it is used in standalone form in order to be able to communicate files to some of these other STARLINK packages and bits and pieces of my software that use NDF. Once again I direct you to the STARLINK software store if you are not a STARLINK site. Be aware that NDF requires many different libraries, but these are downloaded as well if you use the software store, so it should be easy.

The STARLINK software is very easy to download, so don't be put off! If you can, I would make the top level directory be called /star. In each case load the pre-compiled binaries for your OS.

Setup procedure

If all the above is ready then you should now cd to the F77/molly sub-directory. There you will see a file called Makefile. You need to edit it according to the instructions that you will find inside it. However see below if you have problems installing.

Compilers, operating systems

Most of my software is written in Fortran77 and has been compiled successfully under ULTRIX, OSF, Solaris and SunOS with f77 and under Linux with g77. A few C routines are also used for which you will need 'gcc' or 'cc'. Although molly originated under VMS it has been modified enough since then that it will not work under VMS and quite a bit of work would be needed to get it going.


Tom Marsh, Warwick, 18 November 2004