do you have IRAF in there ?
no, Kartik has a version on the linux system, and for home use you can also find it on the LfA CD-set
I get an error "/astromake/astromake_start: No such file or directory."
well, either astromake was not installed on your system (e.g. if you are on solaris :-), or you installed it, but not in /astromake. Probably somewhere else. Find out where the astromake_start file is. On linux you can use the "locate" command for that.
I am a (ba)sh user, what can you do for me?
SOL, i'm a tcsh user. this package was initially written for me. However, there is some support for .sh already, just not at the top level (astroload). Look in $ASTROMAKE/rc which packages have functional .sh versions (not many, but it's not hard to add).

can i add my own packages under astroload control?
yes, quite easily. create a script package.csh in $ASTROMAKE/rc, and that should already do it. It would be nice to set a one line version identifier in $ASTROMAKE/status. Your $ASTROMAKE/rc/package.csh script might also be useful for the general astromake distrubution. We have quite a few packages where the script is already defined, though we don't hand out their pacakges for obvious reasons. gcc is one of those.

Here's a session example for a version of gcc:

    cd /tmp
    wget  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gcc/gcc-3.2.2/gcc-3.2.2.tar.bz2	(the exact URL can differ per version)
    mkdir /astromake/opt/gcc				(in case it didn't exist)

    tar jxf gcc-3.2.2.tar.bz2				(more newer ones will use bz2 extensions)
								tar jxf gcc-3.4.3.tar.bz2 for those....
    cd gcc-3.2.2
    mkdir _build
    ../configure --prefix=/astromake/opt/gcc/3.3.2 --enable-threads --enable-languages=c,c++,f77
    make bootstrap
    make
    make install

    edit the /astromake/opt/gcc/VERSIONS file to have an entry for 3.2.2
    edit the /astromake/status/gcc to contain the default (e.g. 3.2.2)

    astroload -v						see if you new package version shows up

and now you're set. The command 'astroload -v 3.2.2 gcc' should now load this version in your path, check by using the command "which gcc" or "gcc -v".

I got the following error message:
```
bash: setenv: command not found
bash: astromake_start: line 9: syntax error near unexpected token `set'
bash: astromake_start: line 9: `  if ($path[2] != $ASTROMAKE/bin) set path=(. 
$ASTROMAKE/bin $path[2-])'
```
yes, this is because your shell is bash, and you should be using tcsh. I don't support bash too well yet. You can either temporarely issue the command tcsh, and work within that shell, or with the command chsh change your shell.
my program gives me an error "error while loading shared libraries: libpgplot.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"
it might be that it doesn't know where to get it from. e.g. if you have pgplot via one of the astroamke packages (e.g. miriad or nemo) generally those will set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point to the directory where libpgplot.so is located.
Or you can set it yourself, for c-shell
```
        setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH directory_in_which_pgplot.so_is
```
The command 'ldd' will show you where an executable finds it shared libraries.
...
...
What new things can we expect in the future, i mean, what's in the pipeline?
Probably in order of importance...
- quick-and-dirty building packages from source, as per gcc example above
- support for non-linux machines, notably macosx
- support for (ba)sh users
- allow to un-load a module ('astrounload')
- multiple astromake versions (e.g. a system one, and your private one)
- conversion to Environment Modules which is supported under several linux distributions