Installation (User)

System Requirements

  • Linux or Windows with WSL. For macOS we recommend you use Docker, starting with version 0.18.1 of the image.

  • 8GB RAM

  • 10GB disk space

  • GPU-acceleration requires proprietary nVidia drivers/CUDA >= 11

Install Karabo

The following steps will install Karabo and its prerequisites (miniconda):

# install conda & solver
wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
source ~/miniconda3/bin/activate
conda init bash
conda install -n base conda-libmamba-solver
# setup virtual environment
conda create -n karabo python=3.9
conda activate karabo
conda config --env --set solver libmamba
conda config --env --set channel_priority true
# install karabo
conda install -c nvidia/label/cuda-11.7.0 -c i4ds -c conda-forge karabo-pipeline
# in case you use wsl2
conda env config vars set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/wsl/lib

Dealing with the error ‘OSKAR library not found’

If you use Karabo and get the error RuntimeError: OSKAR library not found. then this because the correct CUDA drivers are not installed. Karabo relies on CUDA drivers 11.7. It has been reported that often versions > 12 get installed automatically. In this case the above mentioned error is shown at runtime. More information about this issue can be found here (issue #568). Refer to this issue for a workaround.

Please refer to the troubleshooting section at the bottom of this page if you feel something else does not work.

Update to latest Karabo version

A Karabo installation can be updated the following way:

Note: Even though we care about not introducing API-breaking changes through different minor releases of Karabo, we don’t guarantee it.

conda update -c nvidia/label/cuda-11.7.0 -c i4ds -c conda-forge karabo-pipeline

Older versions of Karabo

Karabo versions older than v0.15.0 are deprecated and therefore installation will most likely fail. In addition, we do not support Karabo older than latest-minor version in case dependency resolving or online resources are outdated. Therefore, we strongly recommend using the latest version of Karabo. If an older version of Karabo is required, we recommend using a container, as the environment is fixed in a container, or extract the environment dependencies using conda env export --no-builds. However, outdated online resources may still occur.

Additional notes and troubleshooting

  • Don’t install anything into the base environment except libraries which are supposed to live in there. If you accidentally install packages there which are not supposed to be there, you might break some functionalities of your conda-installation.

  • If you’re using a system conda, it might be that you don’t have access to a libmamba-solver, because the solver lives in the base environment, which belongs to root. In this case, you can ask your admin to install the solver, try an installation without the libmamba solver OR we recommend to just install conda into your home (which is the recommended solution).

  • Additional files not packaged with Karabo, e.g. surveys, are downloaded from the CSCS object store. We had a case where downloads were hanging indefinitely. The culprit was a non-default MTU value (!= 1500) configured on the network interface. If you should experience this, please check your network interface configuration with ip a and change the MTU to 1500 if it should differ, see this link.