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Having a bit of a problem

Nishkin wrote on Jun 28, 2006

Hello,
I am new to IRAF and all. This summer I must do some spectroscopy for my teacher. The thing is they installed IRAF on the school computers but I can access the server and IRAF with a SSH Secure shell. I can access IRAF with the command cl from my computer at home.
But when I want to open a xgterm window I get an error "Can't open display"

But I need the xgterm window to use apall,splot,implot.

Any help would be appreciated.
I must say I am a beginner too..so I will need some good explanation :D

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Jun 28, 2006

The "cannot open display" is an X11 message that means either you haven't set your DISPLAY environment variable so the window will appear on the remote machine (I assume you're logging into the school machine and starting xgterm there?), or since you ssh in you haven't used the "-X" flag (and sometimes -Y on mac systems) to enable the X11 forwarding to make it work, or both.

If you have an xgterm on your local machine you can just ssh in through that and start the CL. If not, the assuming your home machine is "foo.home.com" and the remote iraf machine is "bar.school.edu" then try something like:


foo.home.com%  ssh -X bar.school.edu
bar.school.com%  setenv DISPLAY foo.home.com:0.0
bar.school.com%  xgterm &


Note you'll need an X server running on the home machine and I'm assuming there are no firewall issues. If you're using Windows at home then there is a Cygwin port of IRAF available and you could run everything locally at home, you'll need to install Cygwin anyway to get the X server.

Cheers,
-Mike

Last post on Jun 28, 2006