Reference: Running Chandra cscview on Fedora Linux

2013 February 7

Update 2018/10: it looks like CSCView is no longer offered as an applet.

You’re supposed to access the Chandra Source Catalog with a Java applet, but it appears there’s no version of Java compatible with both the applet and Firefox. (In the sense that many Java versions have big security bugs and Firefox blocks them.) Thus although there are recommendations for using the applet on Fedora Linux I believe they are now inoperative. Here’s a solution.

1. Download and install the latest Java 1.6 JDK. The JRE won’t cut it since we need the appletviewer program. The instructions above call for 32-bit, but I think that’s only for Firefox compat; 64-bit should be OK.

2. Download a local copy of the HTML for the viewer applet (originally at http://cda.cfa.harvard.edu/cscview/cscview). The official version specifies width="100%" which appletviewer can’t handle; I can’t think of a clever way to get around this.

3. Edit the local copy to say something like width="640" height="480".

4. But now we’ve lost the base URL, so create a subdirectory called client and download the jar files mentioned in the HTML, e.g., jsamp-1_0_0_0.jar.

5. Edit jdk*/jre/lib/security/java.policy and copy the java.security.AllPermission to apply to all applets. Yeah, we’re classy.

6. Finally, run jdk*/bin/appletviewer file:///path/to/your/cscview.html.

7. (Optional) Discover the cscview doesn’t do what you want. ☹