Using the VM

• The VM comes with an ~/iraf directory, containing a default login.cl & uparm/.

• The geminiconda environment is activated automatically on login.

• Start DS9 (or XImtool) and PyRAF in your VM session:

  ds9 &
  cd iraf
  pyraf
  gemini
  

• You may then continue processing data as usual. All the IRAF packages from Gemini’s Astroconda channel are available, along with emacs & vi.

• You can also use DRAGONS (and other conda packages), but it’s better to run those directly on the host machine wherever possible, since processing data on non-x86 machines is an order of magnitude slower when using the VM and you are more likely to run into resource limitations there. Only the IRAF packages require a VM on MacOS.

• You can administer the conda packages in /home/irafuser/miniconda3 as usual, though conda commands might take some minutes to run on the VM. The operating system (CentOS 7) installation is not intended to be user-maintainable.

• It should be possible to leave the VM running while your laptop is suspended and resume processing later – but you may find that the clock time is wrong on the VM afterwards. There is currently no way to suspend the VM itself.