IRAF for Alpha Linux

Doug Tody wrote on Jan 13, 1998

Hi Peter,

> I wonder if there will be an implementation of IRAF for Alpha Linux?
> If yes, when willl it be available.

We don't have any immediate plans to support Linux except on PCs and Macs,
as the vendor Unixes for workstation platforms are better supported and
more heavily tested than Linux (on those platforms, not PCs) and are
generally of high quality.  Digital Unix in particular is quite a good
Unix system.  Although we may not support Linux on all possible platforms,
we do plan to support the GNU compilers on *some* workstations since e.g.
the F2C/GCC combination is top quality, and compilers can be a major
expense so using GNU here can save some money.  Currently though, among
the workstation systems we have immediate plans to support the GNU compilers
only on Solaris, mainly so we can use them for s/w development.

Providing all these variations as turnkey supported options takes resources,
we have to look at the expected usage in deciding to support an option.
We are constantly reviewing platform support so the decision to support a
particular option may differ in the future.

Just curious - why do you want to use Linux on the Alpha rather than DU4?

	- Doug

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Doug Tody wrote on Jan 13, 1998

> > Just curious - why do you want to use Linux on the Alpha rather than DU4?
> > 
> We use no original DEC Alpha machines, but only with Alpha PCs with 
>  Alpha  mainboard and CPU. The advantage is that the other parts of the
> machine are standard PC components which is much cheaper than DEC equipment.
> 
> The disadvantage is that DEC OSF will not run on them. (OSF is checking an 
> adress at the CPU not available on the PC Alpha.) 
> 
> Thats the reason why we use Alpha Linux and why we would need IRAF also 
> for this OS.

Thanks, I have not seen these machines and I did not understand the
situation.  Certainly if the alternative is Windows one would want to run
Linux.  At present we couldn't support this platform as it uses a unique
hardware combination and we don't have one available locally for platform
support.  It probably wouldn't be too hard to port IRAF to it since it
is a combination of Linux and the Alpha CPU, both of which we already
support, but there are always a few nontrivial system things (e.g. floating
point exception handling) that require some customization.      - Doug

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Last post on Jan 13, 1998