Installing ESO Scisoft on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit

European Southern Observatory's Scisoft is a collection of astronomical software applications. It includes IRAF, PyRAF, MIDAS, CASA, DS9 among other data analysis, image display, and scientific libraries.

The latest version of Scisoft is 7.7. It is a 32 bit package and therefore need some external dependencies to be satisfied before it can be used on 64 bit Ubuntu.

Here are the steps I followed to install it on Ubuntu 14.04 -

1. Downloaded the latest version in tar format from ESO Scisoft website.
2. As root, uncompress the downloaded file :

   cd /
   sudo tar xvfz path-to-scisoft-save-dir/scisoft-7.7.0.tar.gz
   

3. As Scisoft is 32 bit software, we need to install 32 bit external packages to resolve dependency issues. I followed the suggestion on this askubuntu.com post to install 32 bit libraries. Ran the following commands in terminal :

   sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
   

4. Following suggestion on this post, I installed the dependencies using following commands : 

   sudo apt-get install tcsh:i386 libgfortran3:i386 libreadline5:i386 
   libsdl-image1.2:i386 libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386 unixodbc:i386
   

5. Downloaded packages libg2c0_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb and gcc-3.4-base_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb from Ubuntu archive. Install both :

   sudo dpkg -i libg2c0_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb
   sudo dpkg -i gcc-3.4-base_3.4.6-8ubuntu2_i386.deb
   

6. I had to install libxft2, libxrandr2, and libxmu6 for xgterm and graphic windows to work in IRAF and PyRAF :

   sudo apt-get install libxft2:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxmu6:i386
   

7. We are all set to initialize IRAF. For the first run, run following command to set paths and environment variables :

   . /scisoft/bin/Setup.bash
   

   There is a space between dot(.) and first slash(/).
8. Make a new directory and run mkiraf to generate login.cl file. You can customize the login file as per your requirement.
9. To start IRAF, open a xgterm window by running xgterm & command in terminal. Type ecl in xgterm window to start IRAF session. The command should be issued in the same directory where the login.cl file is lying. Otherwise the command will fail.
10. To start PyRAF, just type pyraf command in terminal.
11. Test if DS9 graphic window is able to display image and you can examine the image using imexam.