iraf.net

Rick Wenk called from Bell Labs to report that they are finally decommissioning
their UNIX VAX and its attached IIS image display. Tony Tyson got a SPARC-
station to replace the VAX. But he also purchased a RasterOps 24 bit frame
buffer. He had told Rick that he had seen a 24 bit color system attached to
a Sun running IRAF at NOAO, and therefore IMTOOL supported 24 bits, but after
some questioning that appears to have been the Matrix analog film recorder, a
different thing entirely!The RasterOps is supposed to be Sun CG8 (9?) compatible. We already knew
that IMTOOL crashes when trying to fire up with a CG8 (Pui Hin at Hawaii),
and Rick verified this with the RasterOps as well. We never had a CG8 here
to test with imtool, and I believe Doug had said that it shouldn't be hard
to get imtool to at least fire up and perhaps work in 8bit emulation mode
with a CG8. But getting it to handle RGB imaging with a CG8 / RasterOps board
would require code modification.We discussed the various options. Although the IRAF project now has or shortly
will have 3 workstations with 24 bit frame buffers (SGI, IBM, Mac), none of
them support SunView. All will eventually support X, but currently none of
these manufacturers' X servers supports 24 bit color. Presumably also, a
future release of OpenWindows will support an X server compatible with 24 bit
color and the CG8/RasterOps. So, Rick Wenk can either try to modify IMTOOL
on his own now to do true color imaging, or wait for X support. He will take
a look at the imtool code. I'm sure Doug will have suggestions or comments
next week.