SciPy

It turns out there are a lot of resources out there for scientific computing with Python. I'm exploring rewriting various bits of code I use in Python, particularly those that call Perl and Shell Scripts and are not self-contained. I like that Python is freely available, unlike IDL, and easy to program and use regularly, unlike IRAF. In fact, I think this is the motivation behind PyRAF.

SciPy is located here. I haven't explored the library much, but I bet it will be useful. The other important package, Numpy, is also here, but I acquired it from the STSci Institute. From STSci, I also got a key set of libraries called PyFITS, which allows FITS table and image handling. As of this writing, those couple of libraries were no larger than a few MB.

It looks like SciPy is a bit involved. It requires LAPACK libraries, which require the g77 FORTRAN compiler or something similar. I need to read up on this a bit more before I proceed. SciPy won't be as easy to install as I had hoped.

UPDATE:
I got lucky and found that binaries for FC6 have been created and are posted here, after you follow some links to this . Many thanks to this guy. He rightly advises not building LAPACK youself if you don't have to. I think you can set this up as a yum repo, but I just downloaded, rpm'ed:
1) rpm -ivh cushello
2) rpm -ivh refblas*.rpm
3) rpm -ivh lapack-*.rpm
4) rpm -ivh lapack3-*.rpm --replacefiles
5) rpm -ivh python-numpy
6) rpm -ivh python-scipy

Step 4 is a bit risky, but I forged ahead and have noticed no ill effects yet. If you don't RPM with this option, conflicts arise. I chose to brute force past the problem.

IRAF/PyRAF

IRAF is a free, widely-used image analysis tool. Installation went off without hitch (at least so far), following their instructions. I would love to rewrite them to be a little more transparent, at least to me. You could almost write a wrapper to install everything, except for maybe the creation of the IRAF user. It would be great if they could do away with that step, and I'm actually not sure why it's needed.

PyRAF was a different story this time around. I've installed it before with success, but this time has been more troublesome. There was a recent update (15 Jun 2007), which may be why things are things are different. I'm using their source dist'ns everywhere (instructions) I hit a problem when running the config step for tcl/tk, in which I get an error at line 6208. I'm not sure what the problem is here. Is it FC6? Or maybe I don't have all the right paths defined? I've tried dumb things like commenting this text out, but it doesn't fix the problem. I also tried using rpms and yum repositories for later versions of tcl/tk, but I think I really need to compile from source. I'm dropping this for now, and I'll come back to it when I have more patience.

SciSoft

While I'm busy installing stuff on this new laptop, my officemate pointed out a very cool astronomical mega-package: SciSoft with a huge list of free astronomical tools, some great, some pretty good. I'm trying the yum version. The repository is quite big, so make sure you have enough space in /var, or whereever your local repository lives. There are also rpm and tarball options. The yum and rpm versions are setup for FC6, while the tarball can be compiled for whatever.