Northern Arizona University
Department of Physics and Astronomy

Getting Started on the Department Unix Machines
Fall, 2001
Gary E. Bowman
 

This tutorial is intended to provide a bare-bones introduction to the departmental Unix machines.

Once your account has been set up, you can begin.  Physically, you may work from any of the Unix machines in the department, or from one of the PCs in room 305.  These PCs have eXceed loaded, which acts as a Unix terminal emulator, and so reproduces the working environment found on the Unix machines.  [Warning!  The PCs sometimes do not operate properly when running Unix-based graphics programs, such as xmgr.  When running such programs, it is best to use one of the Sun workstations.]

Although you may physically work from many different departmental machines, your account is probably set up so that you must actually ("electronically") work on the machine called bohr.*  Do this as follows.  When logging on using eXceed, a window will appear asking you to choose a machine to work on.  Choose bohr.  On the Sun workstations, there is a button on the login screen labelled "options".  Choose this, then choose "remote login," and then choose bohr.

At the time of your initial login, you will be given the opportunity to use a tutorial for the Sun windowing environment.

Many familiar tasks, such as file and directory manipulation, text editing, etc., can be carried out in the Sun windows environment.  Nevertheless, it is good to gain experience working in Unix proper -- and some operations, such as compiling and running FORTRAN programs, and transferring files from other Unix machines, MUST be carried out using Unix commands.

Unix commands are executed from one of two programs: the terminal, or the console.  To access either of these from the windows environment, click and hold the right mouse button, choose programs, and choose terminal or console.  A window will appear with the prompt "bohr %", from which you may enter Unix commands.


You can easily find many Websites with information and/or tutorials on Unix.  Here, for starters, are two at varying levels of treatment.

The site www.nau.edu/its/acad/docs/unix/introunix.html provides a (very) cursory introduction.

Idaho State University has a nice tutorial at: www.isu.edu/departments/comcom/unix/workshop/unixindex.html.

*If you have an existing department account (not set up for this course), you may be able to work on other machines, also.