Finishing and Testing the McStas distribution

Once installed, you may check and tune the guessed configuration stored within file

• MCSTAS\tools\perl\mcstas_config.perl on Windows systems
• MCSTAS/tools/perl/mcstas_config.perl on Unix/Linux systems

where MCSTAS is the location for the McStas library.

The examples directory of the distribution contains a set of instrument examples. These are used for the McStas self test procedure, which is executed with

    mcrun --test # mcrun.pl on Windows

This test takes a few minutes to complete, and ends with a short report on the installation itself, the simulation accuracy and the plotter check.

You should now be able to use McStas. For some examples to try, see the examples/ directory. Start 'mcgui' (mcgui.pl on Windows), and select one of the examples in the 'Neutron Sites' menu.

Important note for Windows users: It is a known problem that some of the McStas tools do not support filenames / directories with spaces. We are working on a more general approach to this problem, which will hopefully be solved in the next release.

Also, there are known issues for McStas with recent Perl versions for Windows. We recommand to use ActiveState Perl 5.6.