In some cases, loading the environment module is not sufficient to complete the setup for a package. This is currently true for these modules:

• iraf (but: environment setup is usually not needed to use the program, only when building your own tasks or running them from scripts outside the cl)
• miriad (but: environment setup is usually not needed to use the program, only if you want to use tasks from outside the miriad shell)
• newstar (dynamic list of aliases and some files are created when starting up)
• pydbsm (LOFAR setup)
• scisoft
• starlink

The proper way to set up these environments, is with the package command, which will initialize the environm,ent module and do some additional setup which is hard to convert to a module file format. Note that there is no unload method for these packages, some of these settings are even more difficult to undo than to set up.

In case of MPI, there is a complication: not only do we offer multiple versions of MPI (currently MPICH and OpenMPI), but since MPI also offers a python module, we have to split this in a module file for python 2.x and one for python 3.x. By default, mpi/mpich-x86_64 is loaded when you log in. On Fedora ⇐ 21 and RHEL ⇐ 7.x, this offers the python 2.7 version fo the module. For any other version, use a module switch command:

module switch mpi/mpich-x86_64-python3
module switch mpi/openmpi-x86_64-python3
module switch mpi/openmpi-x86_64-python2
module switch mpi/mpich-x86_64-python2
module switch mpi/openmpi-x86_64

The version without a reference to a python version in its name, sets the PYTHONPATH for the system default version of python (currently 2.7). For the sake of completeness, and in order to be absolutely sure for which python version you are loading the environment, we provide the versions with -python2 and -python3.