The introduction course to astronomical software contains a chapter on AIPS

Our installation usually has the current development version of aips (31DECyy with yy the last two digets of the current year) as TST version, the stable release (last year's version) as NEW and the version from before that time as OLD.

AIPS can be started by running the command aips. There is a small deviation from a standard AIPS setup here:

• If environment variable $FITS is set, its value is preserved, in stead of pointing to a location in $AIPS_ROOT (which would then need to be writeable by all users).
• All computers have a local directory /data1/DA00 and the variable $DA00 is made to point there.
  

So please be aware that if you bypass our startup script to call STARTAIPS.SH directly, you will loose this setup, and all tasks will run very slow, because all DA00 files will live on a disk on a central server.

Users should also have a file .dadevs listing their personal data areas. We have a script called aipsdisk-setup that can create such a file, by default using all local disks. See aips help (http://www.aips.nrao.edu/cgi-bin/ZXHLP2.PL?AIPS) for details about the .dadevs file and other methods to specify where your data lives.

Since all data resides in your own directories, the aips number asked at startup is something you can choose yourself. You don't have to coordinate your user number with others or with system management. Note that number 0 is special, used by aips startup and some internal tasks.

When running aips in a virtual desktop such as a VNC session (or X2GO, RDP or OpenOnDemand), special care has to be taken to get the TV server and message server to display locally. In this case, start aips using:

aips TV=local

(basically, this prevents aips guessing the computer you logged in to, and trying to connect back to that machine to start the tv (and tek) servers there (which will fail).

See also: http://www.aips.nrao.edu/cook.html for more general information on the AIPS software.

In addition to the main AIPS software, we also offer ParselTongue