Installing NICOS

Get the source code

NICOS is maintained in a Git repository hosted at the FRM II. You can clone this repository using

git clone git://trac.frm2.tum.de/home/repos/git/frm2/nicos/nicos-core.git

Alternatively you can get the current snapshot from

http://trac.frm2.tum.de/cgit/cgit.cgi/nicos/nicos-core.git/snapshot/nicos-core-master.tar.bz2

For development, we use SSH access via Gerrit:

git clone ssh://trac.frm2.tum.de:29418/frm2/nicos/nicos-core.git

Note that you have to log in once at the FRM II Gerrit instance and add a public key for SSH, since only public key authentication is enabled.

The bug tracker and project wiki are at

https://trac.frm2.tum.de/projects/NICOS/

Requirements

• At least Python 2.5
• For the basic system:
  • numpy
  • the TACO Python libraries (optional)
  • scipy (optional, for fitting and data analysis)
  • gnuplot-py (optional, for liveplot display in gnuplot)
  • MySQLdb (optional, for proposal DB query)
  • python-xmpp (optional, for Jabber notifications)
  • pyserial (optional, for TACO-less serial line communication)
• For the status monitor: one of PyQt4, PyGTK, PyFLTK or Tkinter
• For the client-server GUI:
  • PyQt4
  • numpy
  • PyQwt (optional, for liveplot display)
  • scipy (optional, for fitting)

Configure and build in-place for experimenting

For development and testing purposes, NICOS components can be run directly from the source directory. For this, you have to build the C modules once using make inplace:

cd nicos-core
make inplace

Now you can start the individual components. A minimal setup that uses all the major components can be started using

bin/nicos-cache &
bin/nicos-poller &
bin/nicos-console

The console will load the test setups from custom/test/setups. The startup setup contains a few devices that show basic usage of the NICOS system. Call help() in the console to get a list of commands, and listdevices() to get a list of devices that can be manipulated. You can also call help(dev) to get help for an individual device.

Configure and build the distribution at an instrument

For specific instruments, we will set up a set of setups and customizations for that instrument. When this is done, the installation process looks like this:

cd nicos-core
make
[sudo] make install INSTRUMENT=<instrument name>

The configuration will be installed as /opt/nicos/setups by default, but that is also configurable for each instrument.