[mesa-users] using MESA for education

[Robert Izzard]

Hi all,

Time to briefly de-lurk before heading back into the nightmare that is workshop organisation and proofreading.

Indeed, Window To The Stars (WTTS) works from a live CD (as they were in the day!) and of course this can be put on a USB stick. The version you can download from my website (http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~izzard/window.html) is for Evert Glebbeek's version of Peter Eggleton's excellent TWIN code. We use this in our computer labs precisely because it's so light: installing MESA filled my disk, while TWIN is tiny in comparison and its RAM footprint is generally far smaller. When you have a lab of 30 students running on NFS mounted partitions on dated hardware, this is a bonus. 

If I'm going to do this again, e.g. for MESA, does anyone know what's the best linux distribution to use when making an image for a USB stick?

Anyway, I digress ... I am working when I can (weekends, mostly) to make WTTS use MESA. I have most of it functioning (option settings, logs, HRD, rho-T, internals, structure, Kippenhahns, photos) , I just need to fix the restart from a photo and it'll be ready to go. Rich, is this something I should think about merging into your SDK at some point? It needs MESA source at least because it needs the source code to find all the defaults. (Unless there's a way to put a command line switch into MESA to get it to just write out all its defaults? Would be handy.)

There are some issues with MESA documentation I need to discuss with someone: the file(s) with all the default variable settings have documentation in them (in Fortran comments) but it's very hard to read automatically e.g. the comments are either before, after, or on the same line as the variable setting. This needs to be cleared up by someone who knows what they are doing so it can be rendered machine-readable. There also needs to be a standard layout, because I suspect any major changes will break what I have already written. I can adapt, but it'll be a pain to keep changing code.

Also, if there's anyone here who knows how to make .deb packages from Perl code and (importantly) Perl modules, please get in touch. I have tried and failed to do this... but if I can package up WTTS as a package for Ubuntu, it'll be much easier to install.

cheers
rob
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20140610/2682b481/attachment.sig>