Sun/IRAF Installation Guide

Sun/IRAF Installation Guide

1. Introduction

Before installing Sun/IRAF, one must 1) obtain an appropriate Sun/IRAF distribution, e.g., from the IRAF network archive on iraf.noao.edu (or by ordering a tape distribution from NOAO), 2) select the server or node on which the system is to be installed and arrange for sufficient disk space to hold the system, and 3) set aside sufficient time to do the installation. If these directions are followed carefully and mistakes are avoided the basic installation should only take a half hour or so. Additional time may be required to customize the system to configure the local tape drives and other devices, set up IRAF networking, and so on.

At the present time there are two distributions of Sun/IRAF, representing the range of systems currently marketed by Sun, all of which are supported by the IRAF project. These are the following:

V2.10 Sun/IRAF supports SunOS versions 4.0.3 through 4.1.2 (the current release as of June 1995). The document you are reading is for SunOS. A companion document describes the Solaris/IRAF release (SSOL distribution). We are no longer supporting the Sun 386i, although the V2.10 S386 release is still available for this platform. Sun is also phasing out the old Motorola 68030 based Sun-3 machines, however IRAF will continue to support these while we have SunOS available within NOAO. V2.10.4 Sun/IRAF includes support for Sun-3 platforms running SunOS.

The amount of disk space required to install IRAF depends upon the system configuration, primarily the number of architectures one needs to support (sparc, 386i, f68881 and ffpa (Sun-3), and so on. The main system, including both the core system and NOAO package sources, requires about 47 Mb, less if stripped after installation. Each core system binary requires about 15-17 Mb and each NOAO package binary requires about 12 Mb (assuming OS-4 and shared libraries). The actual numbers will vary slightly depending upon the architecture.