Hello everybody,

I am a student that is trying to install IRAF onto my laptop that is running WinXP(SP2) with Cygwin. But I have run into a couple of problems. I have tried to follow the instructions by CJ Burke and have gotten IRAF to run. But when I try to use rfits to convert some .fit files, I get the error that the system cannot open the pixel file. Looking around, I tried to run the final install script given in PC-IRAF V2.12 installation guide, but I get the error that the it is unable to determine platform archiecture (using tcsh).

Thanks in advance. If you need more info let me know.

William

The "cannot open pixel file" usually means your 'imdir' (i.e. the place where the system puts pixel files for .imh format images) is invalid. This is set by default at the install time but can be changed in your login.cl (just edit the file and log back in). You can use the special "HDR$" syntax to put the .pix files in the same directory as the .imh headers, e.g.

cl> reset imdir = "HDR$"         or
cl> reset imdir = "HDR$pix/"

The latter command will put/create a 'pix' subdirectory for the .pix files.

I'd also recommend you install the port from this site as it is more current and defines a 'cygwin' architecture for the system (Chris port made use of the 'linux' architecture name which may be causing the confusion).

Cheers,
-Mike

Thanks for your reply, I have taken your advice and am installing the ports from iraf.net. Everything went smoothly until, again, I try the install script. Now it is giving me an error that I must reset the permissions on my iraf directory tree and try the script again. Any help would be great.

Thanks,
William

You can change the permissions on the directory tree with the command

prompt%  sudo chmod -R o+r,o+x /iraf

the grant read and execute permissions to 'other' users.

-Mike

Mike,

Thanks for all you help. I have gotten IRAF and Cygwin to play nice and they both work now. One last thing though, what is the easiest way to install both ds9 and an xgterm into Cygwin?

Thanks again

William

Just get the binaries and install them someplace like /usr/local/bin. The xgterm binary is the same as Chris Burke's until I get around to fixing mine, DS9 can be downloaded from the SAO site.

Cheers,
-Mike

Hello, Mike!

there is an archive xpa.tar.gz for download in iraf/ds9 download directory.
What is it and what is it for? I have not find any mention about it in any guide

Ludmila

Ludmila,

XPA is the "messaging system" used by DS9 to communicate with other programs. In practice, an XPA-enabled applications (DS9 for example) defines "access points" to listen to, and user (with command line tools such as xpaset or spaget) can send commands via the access points, and get back data such as internal variables or image buffers, and so on...

You can read more info here:
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/xpa/help.html

For a normal usage of DS9 as a display server for IRAF, XPA is not needed (since IRAF uses sockets to talk directly to DS9), but it could be usefull to install the XPA utilities, for example to use them in some script, to trigger DS9 actions that can't be handled directly by IRAF cl. For an examples see this thread:

http://iraf.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=85284

If you want to install XPA tools (like xpaset and xpaget) you can download the binary version, compiled for Win, from the DS9 home page.

Cheers,
Emiliano