theastrophysicist

Spent a good portion of this week trying to install PYRAF on my 64 bit windows 7 laptop. Of course, my laptop is set to dual boot into Ubuntu, but seeing as to how I rarely restart and boot into Ubuntu, I decided that its finally time to try out a virtual machine. I’ve finally succeeded, and here’s some documentation on the path I took.

Go to the system’s BIOS, ensure Intel virtualization is enabled.

Install VirtualBox. (I tried getting Microsoft Virtual PC to work, but no dice)

Download the cd image (.iso) of Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit. I burned it when I was setting up my dual boot, but it isn’t necessary because you can use VirtualBox to mount it.

Set up a virtual machine in VirtualBox, install Ubuntu there. I gave mine 20 GB of hard disk space. Update Ubuntu.

Install guest-additions in the host machine. The mouse should no longer need to be captured by the window to work. Change the screen resolution by editing xorg.conf. Include the following in xorg.conf as well

Section “Extensions”
      Option “Composite” “Disable”
EndSection

Run “sudo apt-get install ia32-libs linux32”.

Install these packages: python-dev, python-tk, python-pmw, libx11-dev, and possibly a c compiler (I can’t remember for sure).

Follow the steps outlined in  http://geco.phys.columbia.edu/~rubab/iraf/iraf-64-bit_step_by_step_installation. Note that the line given above is meant to replace that erroneous 2nd line (I think). You might want to get newer versions as well. If all goes well, you should have a working IRAF installation at this point.

Make sure you have installed numpy and pyfits.

Download the PYRAF tarball, extract, navigate to PYTHONTOOLS and run

sudo python setup.py install

Do the same for the PYRAF folder.

and we are done.

edit: The link to the installation doesn’t work. Seems the author just updated for 32 bit, but didnt bother posting a 64 bit version. This, however, works: http://ihateskittles.com/iraf/iraf_amd64.txt.

I realized that my method of installing pyraf leaves many stsdas packages broken. Here’s a quick fix: whenever you try to load some package (stsdas/hst_calib/stis, for example) and it gives u an error, simply get the package from the stsci_python tarball and install it using sudo python setup.py.

Other notes are that package libx11-dev is necessary, and you should have the latest version of pyfits (not the one found by synaptic) to install pyraf. You might also need libf2c2-dev, but I can’t be sure about that.