Forum der Vereinigung der Sternfreunde

Given the move from learning MIDAS to learning IRAF I thought I would start a new thread with my experience of getting IRAF working.

It has been a very frustrating day. While there is lots on the web on IRAF I found many links did not work (out of date) or I was denied access to files referred to.

In the end I did manage to get IRAF executing on my Win 8.1 laptop.

This required VMware, Ubutun, Anaconda etc. and help from youtube and the web ingeneral.

I will try to reconstruct what I did and how I did it so others can follow if they wish to.

If I had not had a good (if out of date) background in computing I am not sure I would have made it!

Regards Andrew

This is was I did to get IRAF running missing out all the falls starts and mistakes.

I have not repeated it but I hope it works as a sequence.

I have a Win 8.1 laptop so decided on a Virtual machine.

In Windows:

1) downloaded and installed VMware from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/p ... ation.html

2) downloaded Ubuntu 16.10 from here https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop
I followed these instructions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lvy5efLotE .

In Ubuntu:

3) I downloaded and installed Anaconda from here https://www.continuum.io/downloads#_unix
I chose the Python 2.7 64bit version

4) I then installed IRAF from here https://anaconda.org/pkgw/iraf

5) to get IRAF running I followed these instructions from "B" http://www.twilightlandscapes.com/IRAFt ... ro_01.html

When I tried to run DS9 as instructed here http://www.twilightlandscapes.com/IRAFt ... ro_03.html I got an error as it was not loaded. I just followed the instruction given after the error message to install it.

I have now managed to run IRAF and view an image after two days to work. The main difficulty apart from finding a sequence that worked is the new language of UNIX and I am reading up on that.

If I were doing it again I would for steps 3 and 4 look here https://astroconda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.
I would also look at the Python version PyRAF.

I have an old desk top so I may convert it to a UNiX machine with Ubuntu as the operating system and try the AsstroConda PyRAF route there.

Regards Andrew