MSRI Mathematical Graphics at Reed
Using the machines in ETC

The Educational Technology Center (ETC) has computer labs on its second floor that are accessible to you with your key cards. The labs have 16 workstations and 14 laptops running Macintosh OS X (v10.3). You also have remote access to 6 Linux servers. All the machines have Postscript and Java installed, accessible using Unix command-line tools. You have accounts on the machines, and your accounts come with network disk space and web space for storing your work.

There is a printer (named CUS) you can use in ETC 211.

Directions and access

The ETC building is on the main campus across Reed's watery canyon, less than a half mile walk south across the canyon bridge on the east side of the campus.

Login, OS X Desktop Orientation, and Setup

The welcome screen of the machine requests your account name (mgmsriXX) and password that you have been assigned for the school. See Jim Fix for this information.

When you log in, you will be faced with an empty slate of a computer. Once in, the ``Dock'' on the bottom of the screen has icons of programs you can run. The full suite of applications can be found by double-clicking on the disk-drive icon in the upper-right corner, and selecting the ``Applications'' icon that appears in the right side of the resulting folder window. Double-click on any ``Finder'' icon to run its program, single-click on any Dock icon to run its program.

Immediately, there are two additional steps that you should perform, in order:


  1. connect to your network home directory
    Click on the house icon on the right side of the Dock. This puts your network home directory onto the Desktop. You can use this as a permanent repositiory for your work as, unlike the local disk on the laptop, its contents are stored on a separate machine and will not be erased when you log out. I recommend working directly in this directory using the Unix tools. It's file path in the Mac system is
    /Volumes/mgmsriXX
    where XX is your account number.
  2. start X11
    The Mac's Postscript tools require the machine to run the X windows system. You can run it directly by looking for
    Applications/Utilities/X11
    Instead, run X11 by double clicking on the startX11.command icon in your networked home directory. This adds a few useful Unix commands to your path.

Using the software tools

Mac OS X is a Unix-based system and many tools we'll use are executed by a command types into the X terminal (``xterm'') window that pops up once X11 is fully loaded. Some commands that you can execute are summarized below. We'll give your more details and help with these as the school progresses.

Command summary

  • GV (gv) The Postscript previewer.
    To invoke this, type
    gv postscript-filename
    and you get a window with your Postscript document in it. There are controls for zooming and scrolling around and changing the file's display.
  • Ghostscript (gs) The Postscript interpreter.
    This is an interactive command interface to the Postscript language. Type in
    gs-X11
    and an empty document window will pop up within X11. Back in the terminal, you will be prompted for Postscript commands. Any Postscript drawing commands you invoke will be reflected in the document window as you enter them.
  • Java Compiler (javac)
    To compile a java source file (a text file name.java) enter the command
    javac name.java
  • Java Interpreter (java)
    To run a Java application enter the command
    java main-class-name
  • Printing (lpr)
    You can print a postscript document by the command
    lpr -Pcus postscript-filename
    which sends it to the printer in the Mac workstation room. To print text files type
    enscript text-filename -o - | lpr -Pcus
    instead.
  • Emacs (emacs) A programmer's text editor.
    Invoke this with
    emacs text-filename
    and an editing window will appear within the terminal. There is a Mac windowed version of Emacs (runs outside X11) that can be found in Applications or started with the single-word command
    wemacs
    On Linux, emacs brings up another window in X11, so you'll instead want to type
    emacs text-filename &
  • Gimp (gimp, Linux only) The Gnu Image Manipulator Program.
    Invoke this with
    gimp image-filename &
    and a whole bunch of Gimp tool windows, along with your image, will appear.
  • Secure-Shell Remote Access (ssh) There may be times where you'll want to logon to the Linux servers to run additional programs. To do this, type
    ssh -X mgmsriXX@club.reed.edu
    The -X will allow you to open X11 applications remotely on your display. This command can also be used to logon to Unix machines of your department/home machine outside Reed.

Your web directory

You also have been given a Reed web page where you can publish web documents. Any files that you put in the html directory of your networked home directory will be accessible on the web by the URL
http://www.reed.edu/~mgmsriXX