Please note that all the SIEpedia's articles address specific issues or questions raised by IAC users, so they do not attempt to be rigorous or exhaustive, and may or may not be useful or applicable in different or more general contexts.
This page collects the various specific README files (with installation and usage notes) associated to the scripts to install astronomical software on a laptop
Before launching IRAF, you may need to define a couple of environment variables. Put them inside your .bash_profile (or equivalent) file.
For sh and bash: export iraf="/opt/iraf/iraf-2.16.1/" export IRAFARCH="linux64"
If you are unable to change the font size in an XGterm, try the following fix: cd /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/ ; sudo ln -sf /opt/iraf/iraf-2.16.1/vendor/x11iraf/app-defaults/XGterm
If, when launching IRAF from an XGterm, some error message is printed about undefined variables, open the XGterm with the -ls flag (which starts it as a login shell).
To install the i686 (32bit) packages under Ubuntu, try: sudo apt install lib32gcc-8-dev lib32gcc-7-dev lib32ncurses5-dev lib32ncursesw5-dev libxmu6:i386 libxtst6:i386