iraf.net

I recently performed an installation of IRAF on a computer running Fedora 20 x64, and whenever I try to run the test command:


I get the infamous error:


The exact same version of IRAF on other systems (other linux flavours and fedora versions) work perfectly with DS9.
Any ideas as to why this might be happening?

Firstly, you need to be sure that DS9 is running before you try to display, it will not be opened automatically.

Next, in recent versions of DS9 the IRAF display protocol is broken in a new way, i.e. the unix domain sockets don't appear to work. To get the image display working, you need to define an environment variable before starting iraf:

setenv IMTDEV inet:5137

You could also install DS9. v6.x which should also fix the problem.

Thanks for the fast reply

DS9 is running, of course. And I can confirm that the variable solution works as a charm! I haven't been able to test the older DS9, as I can't seem to find it for download, but will try that too.

Thank you very much!

Hi,
I am running ds9&IRAF on Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit, and I had the same problem that was reported here. Setting the IMTDEV variable allows me to display images, but I experience problems with routines which perform some kind of 'drawing' on the display, which now takes a really long time.

I am mainly concerned with stsdas ellipse: every time some region is masked, or every successive ellipse fitting, the redraw operation takes several tens of seconds, which makes the whole task take several minutes even for moderately small images.

Is there something I can do (e.g. set a system variable) to speed up communications between IRAF and DS9?

Sorry, but there is no magic environment variable for this one, it has to do with the way the frame is redrawn in DS9 with each new ellipse. I can't explain why it would takes tens of seconds, you might try an older DS9 version to see if that behaves any better, otherwise my only suggestion is to use a smaller frame buffer if possible (i.e. less data to transfer). You should also check with the DS9 developers to see if they have a workaround.