DEC Alpha OSF1/IRAF Installation Guide

DEC Alpha OSF1/IRAF Installation Guide

2.2. Install the files

If you are installing from tape skip forward to §2.2.2. If you are installing from a network distribution (i.e., from disk) continue with the next section.

2.2.1. Installing from a network distribution

OSF1/IRAF is available over the network via anonymous ftp from the node iraf.noao.edu, in the subdirectory iraf/vnnn/DOSF, where "vnnn" is the IRAF version number, e.g., subdirectory iraf/v210/DOSF for V2.10 OSF1/IRAF.

If IRAF is being installed from a network distribution all the architecture independent IRAF files for both the core IRAF system and the NOAO packages will be in the distribution file as.dosf.gen. This "file" is stored in the network archive as a directory wherein the large distribution file has been split into a number of smaller pieces, e.g.,

% ls as.dosf.gen
CHECKSUMS           as.dosf.gen.Z.12    as.dosf.gen.Z.26
FILES.Z             as.dosf.gen.Z.13    as.dosf.gen.Z.27
as.dosf.gen.Z.00    as.dosf.gen.Z.14    as.dosf.gen.Z.28
as.dosf.gen.Z.01    as.dosf.gen.Z.15    as.dosf.gen.Z.29
as.dosf.gen.Z.02    as.dosf.gen.Z.16    as.dosf.gen.Z.30
as.dosf.gen.Z.03    as.dosf.gen.Z.17    as.dosf.gen.Z.31
       (etc.)
Assume that the directory as.dosf.gen as shown above has been recreated somewhere on the machine on which IRAF is to be installed. We can restore the main IRAF source tree as follows.
% whoami
iraf
% cd $iraf
% cat /path/as.dosf.gen/as.* | uncompress | tar -xpf -
After the above finishes the root IRAF directory should appears as follows (this is for V2.10).
HS.DOSF.GEN  bin.alpha    doc          math         pkg          unix
IS.PORT.GEN  bin.generic  lib          mkpkg        sys
bin          dev          local        noao         tags
The file bin.alpha is a link to the IRAF BIN directory for the "alpha" architecture (for binary executables), which probably does not exist yet. Configuring the BIN directories is discussed in section §2.2.3.

2.2.2. Installing from tape

If you have not already done so, log into the IRAF account so that the files when restored will belong to IRAF. Mount the distribution tape, which may be a DAT tape, an Exabyte, or whatever.

IRAF distribution tapes consist of multiple files separated by tape marks, with a TOC (table of contents) file as the first file on the tape. To find out what is on the tape, rewind it and read out the TOC file as follows (the actual device name will likely be different than that shown in the examples).

% mt -f /dev/nrmt0h rew;  cat /dev/nrmt0h
This should cause a TOC file to be listed similar to the following, except for the file names which will vary depending upon what type of distribution you have (the actual file sizes may differ from what is shown). The example below is for a distribution of OSF1/IRAF for the DEC Alpha, including all available binaries. The file sizes are approximate.
0   Table of Contents
1   AS.DOSF.GEN   52.2Mb   All sources, includes HSI binaries
2   IB.DOSF.ALP   30.3Mb   IRAF binaries (core system, OSF/1 compilers)
3   NB.DOSF.ALP   18.9Mb   NOAO binaries (NOAO packages, OSF/1 compilers)
Here, the first column is the file number on the tape, the TOC file being file zero (the first distribution file is number one), the second column is the name of the tape file, the third column is the file size in megabytes of the uncompressed distribution file (this tells you how much space will be needed to unpack the file on disk), and the last column is a description of the file contents.

There are three types of tape files in the example shown: the AS file, which is all the IRAF sources (the core IRAF system, NOAO packages, and the OSF1 host system interface), the IB files, or IRAF core system binaries, one for each architecture, and the NB files, or NOAO package binaries. The NOAO package sources are included in the AS file since most people requesting IRAF are expected to want the astronomical reduction software, although IRAF can be configured without this if desired. All of the file objects are UNIX tar format files, with the exception of the TOC file which is a simple text file. The distribution files may be compressed if this was necessary to fit all the files on a tape.

In the above example, the DOSF in the file names indicates that these files are for a DEC Alpha running DEC OSF1. A DEC Ultrix distribution is indicated by a DSUX in the file names, a Sun Solaris distribution by SSOL, an IBM AIX distribution by AIX3, and so on. In principle a given distribution tape may contain any combination of these files.

The V2.10 OSF1/IRAF distribution for the DEC Alpha supports a single architecture alpha, which is for DEC's 64 bit Alpha processor. The alpha binaries were generated with the DEC OSF/1 compilers.

The following commands would suffice to restore the main IRAF system to disk, given the distribution tape described by the TOC file in our example above. Once again, the tape device file and possibly the block size will likely have to be changed to whatever is needed for the actual tape device used.

% whoami
iraf
% cd $iraf
% mt -f /dev/nrmt0h rew;  mt -f /dev/nrmt0h fsf 1
% tar -xpf /dev/nrmt0h
After the above tar file read operation, the tape is left positioned to just before the EOF of the file just read, since tar stops reading the file data before reading the physical EOF. Hence, an mt fsf will be required to position to the next file on the tape. Any combination of fsf (forward skip file) or bsf (backward skip file) operations may be used to position to a file on a 9 track tape. On some tape drives, it is safest to plan things so that only forward file skips are used, using a rewind and forward skip if it is necessary to position to an earlier file on the tape.

Once the main system, containing only sources, is installed it is possible to create one or more empty BIN directories for the executables, then compile and link the full system. More commonly one will merely read the precompiled executables off the distribution tape, as we discuss in the next section.

2.2.3. Configuring the BIN directories

In IRAF all the files specific to any particular hardware or software architecture, e.g., for the Alpha chip with the DEC OSF/1 compilers in the case of the DEC Alpha, are contained in a single directory called the BIN, or "binary", directory. To run IRAF you must install not only the AS (all-sources) directory tree, but the BIN directory for each desired architecture. The IRAF core system and the NOAO packages have separate BIN directories.

The BIN directories for the IRAF core system or a layered package (such as NOAO) are located, logically or physically, in the root directory of the IRAF core system or layered package. Every layered package has its own set of BIN directories. In the distributed V2.10 system you will find the following BIN files (directories or symbolic links) at the IRAF root.

link         bin -> bin.generic
directory    bin.generic
link         bin.alpha  -> ../irafbin/bin.alpha
link         noao/bin.alpha  -> ../../irafbin/noao.bin.alpha
If the IRAF directory structure is set up as described in
§2.1.2, with $iraf located at iraf/iraf and the BIN directories stored in iraf/irafbin, then these links will not have to be modified. If a different directory structure is used you will have to modify the links accordingly.

The bin link and the bin.generic directory are required for the correct operation of the IRAF system software (mkpkg) and are maintained automatically by the IRAF software management utilities. Under no circumstances should "bin" or "bin.generic" be modified or deleted. It is a very common error to manually delete the bin link and manually set it to bin.alpha or some other architecture (usually after noticing that the library links in lib$ point to "../bin"). The bin.alpha link can be modified as desired but bin and bin.generic should be left alone.

Assume that the bin.alpha directory has been created somewhere, e.g. in the iraf/irafbin directory, and that the ib.dosf.alp distribution files for the core IRAF system VAX binaries have been downloaded from the network archive. We can restore the alpha binaries with the following commands.

% cd $iraf/bin.alpha
% cat /path/ib.dosf.alp/ib.* | uncompress | tar -xpf -
Similarly, to restore the NOAO package alpha binaries:
% cd $iraf/noao/bin.alpha
% cat /path/nb.dosf.alp/nb.* | uncompress | tar -xpf -
This process is repeated for each architecture, restoring two BIN directories per architecture.

The procedure for restoring a BIN directory from a tape distribution is similar to that described in §2.2.2 for the core system. For example,

% cd $iraf/bin.alpha
% mt -f /dev/nrmt0h rew;  mt -f /dev/nrmt0h fsf 2
% tar -xpf /dev/nrmt0h
would restore the core system bin.alpha directory from tape unit zero containing an uncompressed ib.dosf.alp as file 2 on the tape.