Life on board ESS

The McStas developer team is happy to report that the 1.12b release of our software is finally out.

You can get the installer packages from our download page

McStas 1.12b is mostly a bugfix release, but some new components and example instruments have been included. McStas 1.12b will be the VERY last release in the 1.x series.

Part of the reason for McStas 1.12b and its late arrival is our delay in releasing the next major version, McStas 2.0.

McStas 2.0 will be released late 2010 / early 2011 and will introduce new features that could break ceartain backward compatibility, hence we move from the 1.x series. We are also considering a replacement of the GUI and plotting tools for McStas 2.0.

For a complete list of changes in McStas 1.12b, see our CHANGES document.

The new relase was tested on these platforms:

• Mac OS 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard (but should work on 10.4 and 10.3 also). Both 32 and 64 bit, Intel and PPC systems are supported.
• Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala and 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 32 and 64 bit .deb's are provided. Note: Do not expect these debs to work on earlier releases or other distributions, e.g. Debian
• Windows XP, Vista and 7, 32 and 64 bit. We only provide 32bit executables, but they are tested to run OK on 64 bit
• On other systems, feel free to try our source distributions