Software/data resources

RedHat built-in applications

RedHat/CentOS Linux comes with a wide variety of pre-installed applications, which will be found locally on all machines. A subset of these that we know to be useful are (and let us know if you find others on the system which should be included in this summary list):

• vi: A standard UNIX text editor.

• emacs: A powerful text editor.

• tex/latex: A standard text processing system.

• evince/kghostview: Packages for viewing PostScript files (and more)

• xfig: A package for making diagrams. Particularly useful for making large format posters.

• convert: command from the ImageMagick package that allows you to convert images from one format to another.

• pine: A text-based powerful email client

• kmail: A graphical email client for the KDE window system.

• gcalctool: An X11-based calculator.

Locally installed applications

We have installed a variety of additional packages on the NIS server. These are accessible to all clients over the network through the /home/local directories. A clists of installed packages follows:

• idl. A powerful interpreted language with graphical capabilities. This is a licensed product. Our license allows ten people, anywhere on the cluster, to be running it at a given time.

• IRAF. A standard astronomical image processing package. Set it up before using the first time with the mkiraf command. Start it up with the cl command.

• STSDAS/TABLES. Add-ons to the IRAF package for work related to HST

• AIPS. Another standard astronomical image processing package, with widespread use in the radio community. If you want to use AIPS, you will need to have some special setup on your computer - see a system administrator.

• xvista. Another astronomical image processing package, distributed worldwide by Jon Holtzman of NMSU. Take advantage of the local expertise!

• soffice: link to the OpenOffice suite, which has text processing, presentations, spreadsheet, etc, i.e. an open source alternative to Microsoft Office that runs on the Linux platform (and reads Microsoft files).

• Supermongo. Another plotting package based on the original Mongo but with significant enhancements. Start it up with the sm command.

• Lick Mongo. A plotting package based on the original Mongo by John Tonry, with very similar usage. Start it up with the lmongo command. Also provides a subroutine library which can be linked to using -lmongo

• xemacs. A powerful screen based editor.

• skycalendar/skycalc. Programs for making observing calendars (skycalendar) and computing airmass tables, etc. for astronomical observations (skycalc)

• xv: A package for viewing images in a wide variety of formats, doing some simple image manipulation, grabbing images from the screen, etc

• acroread. Program to read Adobe PDF format files.

• gifmerge. Program to take a set of individual GIF format files and combine them into a single animated GIF file.

• Numerical Recipes library. Provides many numerical subroutines and functions. See the book by Press et al. The routines are provided through an object library. Use -lrecipes_f for f77/g77, -lrecipes_c for c routines.

• slalib. Subroutine library which provides a wide variety of tasks used for making astronomical observations (e.g., airmass, sidereal time, etc.)

• xanim. Package which display movies in a variety of formats

• latex2html. Package which converts LaTeX files into HTML files.

Table of packages, versions, links to sources/docs, update dates, is a TBD item for this manual....

Package	Installed version	Install date	Source	notes
IRAF and related packages
IRAF	2.11-3
CTIO
MSCRED	3.2.3
STSDAS	22
TABLES	22
STSCI APT/VTT	1210
GMS
SEA
Text processing LaTeX2html	2K.1beta
OpenOffice	3.0
SDSS software Plotting software gnuplot	3.7
pgplot	5.2.0
supermongo	2.4.1
Astronomical software HEASOFT	6.6.3	6/09	GSFC
cfitsio
AIPS
difmap
ds9
hstphot
saoimage	1.24
skycal	4.1
tinytim	6.0
other gifmerge
printpro	4.2.1
slalib
xanim	2.80.1

Astronomical data/catalogs

Some widely-used astronomical catalogs have been downloaded to a disk on the server, /home/catalogs. If additional large data sets would be of use, we can add them here where they are accessible to everybody.

TBD: list of catalogs, etc.