FAST Installation Guide

What is FAST ?

FAST is a collection of Ferret scripts and K-shell scripts. Its purpose is to hide a certain number of low-level and repetitive commands which can transform your Ferret scripts in long and unclear programs. With the scripts provided here you will more easilly control and set pages, viewports, texts, legends, colorbars, logos, ratios, zooms and also produce polygon maps and vectors maps.
Ferret is a very powerfull application developped by the PMEL. I strongly recommand to read first the documentation and the tutorial they provide from their web site http://www.ferret.noaa.gov/Ferret/.

Of course, this FAST package of scripts is provided as it is without any garanties...

Check that Ferret is correctly installed.

At the present time, scripts from the FAST package run with Ferret 6.00 release.

Export the FAST package from the CVS repository.

Follow the 3 next steps:

$ cd /where/to/install/the/package
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.ipsl.jussieu.fr:/home/ioipsl/CVSROOT login
Type anonymous 
$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.ipsl.jussieu.fr:/home/ioipsl/CVSROOT export -r FAST_600_1_0 fast

Install the environment variables.

Place the following lines in your .profile ou .bash_profile
For users running the C-shell, enter the following lines into the .login file with changing
export VARIABLE=ARGUMENT by setenv VARIABLE ARGUMENT

 ****************************************************
#------------------------------------------------------
# FAST (Ferret Analysis Scripting Toolbox)
#------------------------------------------------------
export FER_FAST=/where/the/package/has/been/exported

export FER_GO="$FER_GO $FER_FAST"
export FER_DATA="$FER_DATA $FER_FAST"
export FER_PALETTE="$FER_PALETTE $FER_FAST"
export FER_EXTERNAL_FUNCTIONS="$FER_EXTERNAL_FUNCTIONS $FER_FAST"

export PATH=$FER_FAST:$PATH
****************************************************

Distributed with the FAST package, there are 2 template files
install_template_csh.txt  and install_template_ksh.txt which can help
you to perform this setting.

Copy the .ferret file from the FAST package to your home directory.

This file is an initialization file which set usefull alias (shortcurt commands) and execute initialization scripts.

$ cp $FER_FAST/.ferret ~

Congratulations!

You have finished the FAST package installation!
You can now launch Ferret and use all available scripts from the FAST package.
Please notify me Patrick.Brockmann@cea.fr to be referenced in my personnal list of users.

Documentation.

In a Ferret session, you can use the alias fastto list all the components of the FAST package.

yes? fast

You can also access to inlined documentation of each scripts by using

yes? go/h script_name

Prerequisites.

Important. — Several scripts (ferretloop, indexhtml, plt2gif, plt2pdf, ps2gif, ps2png, ps2pdf) distributed in the FAST package use the command convert from http://www.imagemagick.org/, the command gs from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost and the commands pnmfile, pnmcrop, pnmflip from http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/.  Please, proceed to their installation before using scripts from FAST package.
As the GIF image format has been choosen to produce animations, I recommend you to install the package ImageMagick from sources because the LZW algorithm used to compress the GIF images is disabled by default (due to Unisys patent). Set compilation option to --enable-lzw=yes.
Another script (pdf2pdf) use the pdflatex command and the pdfpages package. They are available from http://www.tug.org/teTeX/ and from http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/.
 

Model grid files.

Note. — Some Ferret scripts delivered in FAST will help you to produce maps in different
projections (cylindrical or orthographic). Those scripts, such as map_cylin.jnl or map_ortho.jnl,
use an external file called "grid file" to get additionnal informations (boundaries of the cells of the
model grid for example) which may not be present in the netCDF file you are using.
Those files are searched from directories defined within the FER_DATA environment variable.

You can copy the different model grid files by using the command wget as follows:
                $ wget -r --no-parent -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A.nc  http://dods.ipsl.jussieu.fr/database/grids
You can also copy the all database files (climato, extras and grids directories) by using the command wget as follows:
                $ wget -r --no-parent -nH --cut-dirs=1 -A.nc  http://dods.ipsl.jussieu.fr/database/

Define then the FER_DATA variable as :
                #------------------------------------------------------
                # DATABASE
                #------------------------------------------------------
                export DB="/home/brock/database"
                export FER_DATA="$FER_DATA $DB/grids $DB/extras $DB/climato"