Fabian is designed for the purpose of viewing image file series. In particular such diffraction image files obtained from synchrotron experiments. It was originally written by Henning Osholm Sørensen & Erik Knudsen from the Technical University of Denmark.

The current homepage for Fabian is at https://github.com/FABLE-3DXRD/fabian.

Fabian is easier to install on Linux, either as a separate hard drive or as a virtual machine on your Windows/Apple computer. In case you are not familiar with Linux, ask your administrator for help.

Fabian will need other programs to run. The list is available on the Fabian homepage and scroll down, there is a list of all the stuff you need in order to run Fabian properly. Most of the computers, which were working with Linux before, usually have installed most of these software/libraries already. But if you got a brandnew Linux from your IT guys, there is usually only the very basic stuff on it.

Now you have two options:

1. Download and install all these packages one by one or
2. Download and install Anaconda.

The benefit of Anaconda is that it contains most of the necessary libraries and you are done with installations within 5 minutes. There are also several other advantages coming with Anaconda (for example the installation assistant for GrainSpotter).

Go to the Fabian homepage and click on the green button “clone or download”. Click on “Download ZIP”. After the download is finished, navigate to the “Downloads” folder and unpack the ZIP folder to a directory of your choice.

Open the Konsole and navigate to the unpacked Fabian directory. There should be a folder called “setup.py”. Type the following to the Konsole:

  python setup.py build

If you get an error, there might be some of the additional libraries still missing.

When the installation was successful you should be able to start Fabian by typing

  fabian.py

Be aware that the terminal is now busy with running Fabian. If you want to get the terminal back, you should start Fabian by typing

  fabian.py &

If you forgot the & sign, you can get the hand on the terminal back by typing Crt-Z and then bg in your terminal.