Does IRAF work with SuSE Linux 5.2 ?

Doug Tody wrote on Dec 23, 1998

> I would like to install IRAF on my home PC. I'm currently running SuSE 
> Linux 5.2 and stand alone Figaro 4.4 for data reduction. 
> 
> I am unsure which binary of IRAF to use as I'm unsure whether SuSE 5.2 
> uses glibc or not. Is there a way to tell ?

No easy way that I know of; it was not clear from the SuSE web site.  We do
not run SuSE Linux here so I can't directly answwer questions like this about
SuSE Linux.  However by doing a web search I found that SuSE won't use glibc
until SuSE 6.0 (which is smart).

> If so, should I download the RedHat binary or the Slackware binary?

We don't support SuSE Linux here so it probably doesn't make that much
difference.  I suggest you install the Slackware binaries (bin.linux), which
were built using Libc 5 (glibc is Libc 6).  These are mostly statically
linked and should run on any recent Linux system.  The only place where you
might have problems is in compiling and linking new IRAF software, such as
external packages.  The problems should be minor, but since we haven't tested
anything on SuSE Linux, some minor problems are to be expected.  Prebuilt
binaries for most major IRAF external packages can usually be found in
contrib on iraf.noao.edu.

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Last post on Dec 23, 1998