The first step in the installation procedure is to identify the operating system and corresponding SAS release. SAS is supplied as a single tar.gz archive. Help on how to download SAS can be found at the SAS download web page:
http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/sas-download
This page provides a table showing the different builds and supported Operating Systems available for each SAS release. In addition, for each SAS version, the source code for all the SAS packages is available through a single tar.gz archive. Once the tar.gz archive corresponding to a given SAS release has been downloaded, the installation process is quite straightforward and platform independent. Detailed installation instructions can be found at:
http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/sas-installation
It is recommended to install SAS in a publicly accessible directory on the system (which will be referred here as /top_dir). Once such a directory has been selected, the SAS tar.gz archive should be unpacked there. The unpacking provides, among other files, a script named install.sh, which must be executed to perform the installation. Once the installation is complete, the correspondent SAS release will be located in a subdirectory named:
xmmsas_YYYYMMDD_HHMM
which identifies uniquely each SAS release by the date (YYYYMMDD) and time (HHMM) of its production. Important changes to each SAS release are included in the SAS Release Notes XMM-Newton SAS Release Notes [7].
The installation script will produce two additional shell scripts within the same directory, named setsas.sh and setsas.csh for the Bourne/Bash/Korn shells and csh/tcsh shells respectively. The purpose of these scripts is to initialize the SAS environment for each particular shell.
The install.sh script also makes some additional sanity checks on the installation environment. For example it checks the existence of a perl binary in several predefined directories (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/local/bin and /sw/bin) including one that can be defined by the user through the environment variable SAS_PERL. As soon as a valid perl binary is found in any of these paths, the script changes all SAS available perl procedures to make reference to it. See the following link for more information on any additional requirements:
http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/xmm-newton/sas-requirements