[daip] advice on Linux version for AIPS

[Eric Greisen]

Robert F Willson writes:

 >   For several years. I've been running AIPS (31Dec02 version, I think) 
 > on my Linux machine with Redhat 7.3. Unfortunately, my machine crashed 
 > (something went wrong on the Linux side) and we are now trying to 
 > recover the files, but in the meantinme, I've decided to buy another PC 
 > and install Linux and AIPS on it. My question is: what version of 
 > Redhat do you recommend in order to install the latest version of AIPS? 
 > I noticed on the AIPS web page that you had some warnings, but I'm a 
 > little confused.
 > 
 > I know that Redhat 7.3 is an old version, but would it work with the 
 > latest AIPS ?- we still have the old 7.3 disks, but I'm sure our 
 > systems manager could get a more up-to-date version or anything you 
 > recommend. I also use the Fortran compilers on the Linux box to run 
 > some programs I wrote a long time ago, so that is also a consideration 
 > in which version of Linux I get.
 > 

We now use RedHat Enterprise but RedHat 9 was better but probably no
longer available.  We now recommend binary installation of AIPS so
that you do not need to worry about compilers.  Also the binary load
modules run ~ 30% faster on Pentium IVs in particular, but also fater
even on AMDs.  The aips installation is easy - fetch the install.pl,
put it in your aips_root area and 

    perl install.pl -n

where the -n says to do a binary installation.  Do not fetch the tar
ball.

Cheers,

Eric Greisen