Obtaining and Installing IRAF

This appendix gives a few brief notes about obtaining and installing IRAF. A typical Starlink user is unlikely to be able to carry out a complete IRAF installation. The assistance of your site manager is likely to be required for at least some of the stages and he will probably carry out the complete installation.

IRAF is available for all the variants of Unix currently supported by Starlink (and on various other operating systems). A basic IRAF installation, without any external packages, requires about 100 Mbytes of disk space, though the actual amount varies somewhat between the different variants of Unix. However, about half this space can, if necessary, be reclaimed by deleting source files once the installation is complete.

A copy of IRAF can be retrieved by anonymous ftp from NOAO or the Starlink mirror. The IRAF Web pages (see Section ) give the necessary details. Alternatively the NOAO can send you a copy on tape or CD-ROM, though a small charge is made. Again see the Web pages for details. There is a separate distribution of IRAF for each version of Unix supported and there is no compilation involved in making the installation (though source is supplied).

Before installing IRAF you should obtain and read the following documents:

1. The IRAF installation guide,

2. The IRAF management guide,

3. The README file for your particular machine,

4. The REGISTRATION file.

All these documents can be retrieved from the IRAF Web pages. There are different versions of the first three documents corresponding to each version of Unix supported and you should ensure that you are reading the correct version for the system on which you intend to install IRAF.

The REGISTRATION file is important as it contains a form to be filled in and returned to NOAO by e-mail, so that you can be added to the mailing list for the IRAF Newsletter (see Section ).