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IRAF Update (1Mar95) (from CCS, NOAO Newsletter No. 41, 1 March 1995) The patch to V2.10.3 IRAF, originally planned for late 1994, has been delayed for some time awaiting the release of Solaris 2.4. We just received Solaris 2.4 in late January, and we anticipate releasing the V2.10.3 patch by the middle of February. The main reason for the patch is to support both Solaris 2.4 and the new SunSoft V3.0.1 compilers. The patch will also include all bug fixes to IRAF V2.10.3 made since the release last August. The port to the DEC Alpha running OSF/1 was completed in late December 1994, and the system is now undergoing testing. Look for this to be released sometime in February. An announcement will be posted to the newsgroup adass.iraf.announce when the software becomes available. The release version will be V2.10.3BETA, identical to the V2.10.3 patch mentioned above. Support for OpenVMS running on the DEC Alpha is not planned until the V2.11 release cycle begins later this year. In the meantime a preliminary port to OpenVMS running on the Alpha is available from the STSDAS group at STScI. The PC-IRAF project got underway late in the year. There is no clear winner yet in the PC operating system wars so we plan to experiment initially with several different systems. The initial IRAF port will be to both Linux and Solaris x86, with a BSD port to follow soon thereafter. Testing will be performed on two separate platforms, a high end Pentium 90 system (PCI/SCSI bus, 32 Mb), and a more modest 486DX2 66 MHz system (IDE/SCSI 16 Mb). We plan to test a laptop version of the system later this year as well. By the time we finish testing on all these platforms we should have a pretty good understanding of what kind of performance one can expect to see with IRAF running on a PC. A preliminary port of IRAF to Linux, done by David Mills (a programmer at Kitt Peak), was demonstrated at the AAS meeting in Tucson in January, running on the 486DX2 system mentioned above. The X11IRAF package has also been ported to Linux. Completion of the initial PC-IRAF port will follow as soon as we finish configuring Linux and Solaris on these platforms. Although we do not have any release dates yet, we hope to release the initial PC-IRAF systems within the next couple of months. The IRAF group presented an IRAF demo at the AAS meeting, held in Tucson the second week in January. The new IRAF Version 2.10.3BETA software was demonstrated along with the latest developments in graphical user interface application software including a radial velocity GUI, an aperture photometry GUI, and a spectroscopic analysis GUI. These GUIs are expected to become available for general use sometime later this year, once IRAF Version 2.11 has been released. A highlight of our display this year was a preview of IRAF running on the PC under Linux, using the preliminary Linux/IRAF port done by Dave Mills. As always, it was nice visiting with our IRAF user community at the meeting, and we enjoyed the opportunity to discuss IRAF problems or concerns with them. The IRAF Users' Committee met in Tucson following the AAS, on Friday, 13 January. The IRAF group presented project reports to the committee and discussed priorities for the coming year. An IUC report to the NOAO Director is now being prepared and is expected to appear in the next Newsletter. The current IUC members are: Belinda Wilkes (SAO) - Chair, belinda@cfa.harvard.edu Timothy Carone (UC Space Sciences Lab), tcarone@aegis.ssl.berkeley.edu Peter Eisenhardt (JPL), prme@kromos.jpl.nasa.gov Jeff Pier (US Naval Observatory), jrp@nofs.navy.mil Bill Romanishin (University of Oklahoma), romanishin@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu Bill Sparks (STScI), sparks@stsci.edu Stephen Walton (Cal State, Northridge), swalton@csun.edu. For further information about the IRAF project, please contact Jeannette Barnes (jbarnes@noao.edu), Central Computer Services. Doug Tody, Jeannette Barnes
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