The PC-IRAF project to date has been hugely successful, coming in second only to Sun in the number of distributions. The Linux architecture is by far the most popular, however FreeBSD is used as a development system at NOAO and has proven to be every bit as good.
Information specific to the PC-IRAF release, including information about installation options, a streamlined installation procedure, and any timely notes added after the initial release can be found in the README file. More detailed information on installing and maintaining PC-IRAF may be found in the PC-IRAF Installation Guide and the Unix IRAF Site Manager's Guide respectively. The distribution is available from the IRAF ftp archive or a tape or CD-ROM distribution may be ordered at cost by returning the ORDERFORM
A paper describing the PC-IRAF project entitled "PC-IRAF: The Choice of a GNU Generation" was presented at the ADASS '95 Conference held in Tucson. A postscript version is also available.
While we lack the resources to help users actually install Linux on their machine, there are a number of excellent resources available on the net for those who run into Linux-specific trouble:
We also have plans for a dedicated PC-IRAF CD-ROM distribution. This will likely include not only the distributions and other FTP archive materials on the current CD, but also a complete run-time system allowing IRAF to be run from the CD without installing it on disk. A laptop computer with a CD-ROM and limited disk space will be just as powerful an IRAF machine as a deskside system.
Last updated: 23Mar1998