There is a faily brain-dead unix utilitiy for differencing two files:
diff file1 file2
There is a lovely graphical version on linux called kompare. i highly recommend it (jmw).
Its output can be exported as text to send to distant colleagues. Furthermore the following diff command gives similar (text) output – much to be preferred to raw diff:
diff -U 3 -dHrN — file1 file2
(the 3 means it places 3 lines of context around the change to help you visualize it)
–Joel
Thuban as the server, is more sensitive to rebooting than other machines. Therefore do not reboot thuban unless absolutely necessary.
If it is rebooted, be sure that it has exported all the shared disks for use on other astro net clients. To check that this has successfully happened, log in to another desktop and try cd-ing to various shared disks like /data/psrdata and /docs and so on. If thuban has NOT mounted these disks for sharing, then James Fuller says to enter the following command on thuban:
(as root):# /usr/sbin/exportfs -a
–Joel
this nice simple plot program is at /usr/share/astro/sm
if you put /usr/share/astro in your path, all you have to do is type sm
list device tells you what graphics devices are set up. i recommend x11 or postscript, for screen or paper, respectively.
the following are examples of useful commands inside idl:
print, !path will print out the value of the idl path variable
? will start up help browser
?size goes to help browser to find fnc size (it’ll search for closest name to that)
help, /source brings up compiled procedures, compiled functions
help, pola tells you a lot about the variable pola
help, hdr,/st ditto on structure called hdr
print, size(pola) gives a buncha numbers which can be used by idl or deciphered by ?size
doc_library, ‘readcol’ gives documentation of nonnative fncs, like unix man
$ls executes unix ls command
Also see post entitled idl documentation and help commands from drew
we found that there were two incompatible versions of juldatetoLMST.pro
one is Phil’s arecibo routine, which defaults to arecibo
one is a GBTidl modification to it that defaults to GBT and that has an optional extra parameter.
in order to avoid future confusion, we renamed each routine so that the right version must
explicitly be called:
juldaytoLMSTarecibo.pro
juldaytoLMSTgbt.pro (in /usr/share/astro/gbtidl/pro/toolbox)
NOTE ADDED JUNE 2008: NOTE THIS IS A GBTIDL INCOMPATIBILITY,
NOT A GODDARD LIBE INCOMPAT!
there are a variety of scripts to do it in /usr/share/astro
note they have names like pglink.f77 and contain lines bringing in pgplot and x11 libraries:
g77 -fno-backslash -o $1 $1.f  -L/usr/share/astro/pgplot -lpgplot -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -lGL -xlist
In your .cshrc, you must add /usr/share/astro to your path if you want to be able to see
plots on screen with /xwin or /xserv windows, because pgplot has to be able to find the pgxwin server in that directory at execution time. Joel linked the pgxwin server from its home in /uasr/share/astro/pgplot into /usr/share/astro to make it more findable.
eg; in Joel’s .cshrc, one finds
set path = ( . $path /usr/share/astro /usr/share/astro/idlshare/gbtidl/)
Joel installed uncompress onto Mirzam.
He got the rpm for “ncompress” at
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/2406147/com/ncompress-4.2.4-31.i386.rpm.html
OUT OF DATE as of 2008-11-01.
when thunderbird died, from the redhat applications internet menu, Josh showed Joel how to fix it.
As root on /usr/share/applications, fix mozilla-thunderbird.desktop
In this particular case, I had to change to
Exec=/usr/bin/thunderbird
Icon=thunderbird.png
OUT OF DATE as of 2008-11-01.
OUT OF DATE as of 2008-11-01.
Steps to configure an astronomy department linux client computer.