Problem Installing Iraf on Ubuntu

biledemon wrote on Mar 07, 2007

Apologies for being a leech (asking for help without contributing) but I'm under some pressure to complete a 4th year project and was wondering could I get some help here? Or at least be pointed in the right direction?

I've installed Iraf into the sciscoft directory etc., I'm getting a problem when running the mkiraf command in the Iraf directory that I made inside my home folder. This is the error message I get when running it:

bash: /scisoft/share/iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/mkiraf.csh: /bin/csh: bad interpreter:
no such file or directory

I'm also getting an error when trying to use "source .bashrc" after making the appropriate changes to my .bashrc file:
bash: [: missing `]'
bash: i686: command not found

I'm using Ubuntu 6 (and am afraid that the fact that I didn't install that ncurses4 thing may be causing the problems), I'm a linux newbie so when I see complicated install instructions like those for ncurses I tend to not do it to avoid breaking stuff :)

If someone could point me in the right direction, that'd be great!

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Mar 07, 2007

The error means you don't have the C-shell interpreter installed (i.e. /bin/csh or /bin/tcsh) and so none of the iraf scripts like 'mkiraf' or 'cl' will run (there aren't any bash equivalents in the system). Go back to the Ubuntu setup an install the tcsh package (don't know quite what they call it) and this problem should go away.

Cheers,
-Mike

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biledemon wrote on Mar 07, 2007

Thanks, I'll give it a shot.

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rubab wrote on Mar 07, 2007

This page describes how to setup IRAF on a Ubuntu/Debian machine. Apart from the exact commands, there are some instructions in square brackets that need to be followed. Installation of X11IRAF, DS9, Tables, and STSDAS are included.

http://geco.phys.columbia.edu/~rubab/iraf/

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Last post on Mar 07, 2007