The IRAF system account for PC-IRAF has been customized for Linux and FreeBSD and should autoconfigure for whichever system is being run. Some default window system startup files are provided, but the iraf account is configured mainly to run in an xgterm or xterm (shell-oriented) window. This account is intended for IRAF system management and as a working example showing how to use the various system components. Normal IRAF use should be done from a user account configured using the examples given with the IRAF system account.

% login iraf
% cl

To more thoroughly test the installation it is a good idea to set up a user account to run IRAF and test IRAF from this user account. To do this you login to a user account and run the mkiraf task to set up the IRAF login files. This will create or initialize the user's uparm (user parameter) directory, and create a new login.cl file. It may also be desirable to edit the user's .login file to modify the way the environment variable IRAFARCH is defined. This variable, required for software development but optional for merely using IRAF, must be set to the name of the desired machine architecture, e.g., 'redhat' for Red Hat 5.0 systems, 'linux' for all other Linux distributions, and 'freebsd' for FreeBSD systems.

% mkiraf
Initialize uparm? (y|n): y
Terminal types: xgterm,xterm,gterm,vt640,vt100,etc."
Enter terminal type: xgterm
A new LOGIN.CL file has been created in the current directory.
You may wish to review and edit this file to change the defaults.