Although MIRIAD supports a number of TV devices, only one of these is relevant to ATNF users. This is xmtv, which is a X-windows based display window. Unlike the AIPS TV and some PGPLOT devices, MIRIAD tasks do not start up xmtv automatically for use. You must start it manually. To do this, use
% xmtv &in a terminal window (e.g. the console window) of your workstation. The ampersand (
&) causes the server to be placed in the
background (so that the terminal window can be freed up).
TV-related tasks use the server keyword to indicate the TV
type and its host. For xmtv, this is given in the form:
xmtv@ host
Here host is the host name of the workstation running xmtv. For example
server=xmtv@tucanaindicates that xmtv is running on the machine
tucana.
Note that the computer where you are running MIRIAD
tasks may differ
from the computer running xmtv (e.g. you may be running MIRIAD
\
tasks on a compute server, and running xmtv on your local workstation).
The host part of the server parameter is the machine
running xmtv.
The TV server display can be resized, zoomed, panned and also offers the capability to change the lookup table and transfer function. However, the current MIRIAD TV server implementation is not very well integrated with concepts such as extracting quantitative information from the display (see Chapter 16). Therefore, the TV servers are currently a useful qualititative display only.