displaying to ds9 in mac os 10.5

gerbsb wrote on Oct 21, 2008

Greetings

I just installed IRAF and ds9 in my new MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.5.
Non-display related simple commands seem to work in iraf. However,
I cannot get the display command to pass an image to ds9. I cannot make a fifo to my /dev directory, even with root permissions, so I tried to make one in my home directory, and set my environment variable IMTDEV=fifo:/home/imt:/home/imt1. The permissions seem correct (prw-rw-rw-).
I use the ds9 command:
/usr/local/bin/ds9 -fifo

and when I try to display a fits file, I still get the familiar error...

ERROR: Cannot open device (node!imtool,,1024,1024)

any suggestions? Many thanks in advance for any help!

Best Regards,
-gerbs

PS more on this ... when I start up DS9:

/usr/local/bin/ds9 -fifo:/home/imt:/home/imt1 -imtool &

I get the following error message as ds9 pops up:

ximtool: inet port 5137 already in use - disabled

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Oct 21, 2008

AFAIK, fifos don't work under OSX, but you don't need them. The default for IRAF is to display using a unix socket which ds9 will also open automatically. In almost all cases, simply starting ds9 without flags or setting an IMTDEV variable will work as a default. The message about port 5137 already in use simply means there is another ds9 already running.

-Mike

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Last post on Oct 21, 2008