Linux General Information

Many Machines

We have several different Linux machines in the department. Most of the time, you don't have to worry about which one you should use; they should all look the same once you log in. At present, our primary hosts are named earth, wind, and, and fire.

The machine named and is designated for computationally intensive jobs. If you are doing research that requires hours or days of CPU time, and is the place you are expected to run your programs.

One Account

Even though we have different machines, they all share parts of the same filesystem. This means that if you write a program on one machine, then log in on another machine the next day, it should look like the file is in the same place even though you are working on a different machine.

The same username and password should let you log in on any of our machines.

Linux Operating System

Our primary hosts are running Linux. Linux is a free Unix-like operating system that has received a lot of support from the computer science community. Since it's free, you can get a copy of Linux and put it on a home PC if you like.

Online Documentation

Most unix systems come with a large collection of online documents called "man pages." The man is short for manual. There is a program called man that will let you read the man pages for different topics. For example, if you want to know about the awk command, just type:

  man awk

In fact, if you want to know how to use man itself (this is a good place to start if you have never used man before), you can just type:

  man man

While you are viewing a man page, you can use space (or enter) to move forward in the page and you can type b to move back. If you type a slash (/), it will search forward through the man page for whatever string you enter. Typing a question mark (?) will let you search backward.

There is a graphical version of man called xman. It lets you see all of the topics in each section of the online manual and lets you scroll through each page with a scrollbar. Xman can come in handy if you need to look at more than one man page at the same time.