Previous Article
Next Article
Table of Contents

Kitt Peak Goes X (1Sep94)
(from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 39, 1 September 1994)

As of the last week of August, the observers' workstations at the KPNO
telescopes have been permanently switched over to X-windows. The familiar
Sunview, gterm and imtool of ICE data acquisition have been replaced by
olvwm, xgterm and ximtool. IRAF has been updated to version 2.10.3 to support
the new plumbing required by xgterm and ximtool. ICE itself has also been
updated (to version 1.6), including a few more features that are described in
the ICE manual.

Early returns indicate that this will be a popular configuration. The dual
monitors at the 4-m and 0.9-m telescopes are fully supported - ximtool
automatically appears on the right hand monitor when you log in. Xgterm
provides all of the highly desirable features such as a full screen cursor
that have been sorely missed in the vanilla xterm windows. The window manager
olvwm was selected to allow a natural migration path from Sunview to Motif.
The olvwm window manager is identical to the standard olwm (Sun's Open Look
window manager) in basic usage but provides a virtual screen capability plus
a number of Motif-like extensions that are missing from olwm.

Access to a selection of the more popular X clients is provided through the
rootmenu. NCSA mosaic appears automatically at login with its own menu of
handy astronomical information, including documentation tailored for the KPNO
observing environment. The IRAF xtapemon client also appears on the screen to
help you monitor the status of your tape jobs as you yearn to go to bed in
the morning.

Please let us know what you think!

George Jacoby, Rob Seaman,
Doug Tody, Bruce Bohannan

Previous Article
Next Article
Table of Contents