There are PCs in both labs; you'll find a range of software installed on the machines (Microsoft: Office, Visual Studio; Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere; Alias Maya; Matlab; and others.)

Getting started

Stop by Don Watrous' office (CoRE 221) to get your account.

Once your account on these machines is created (which happens separately from the research filesystem), you can log in. If you are not familiar with Windows, we suggest you spend some time using the on-line help.

There is one very important fact you must know about the PCs:

• Files stored on the PCs are NOT backed up.

  This means if you save something on C: or D:, and it gets erased (someone deletes it, the hard disk crashes, etc...), then it's gone!

Mounting the research filesystem

In Windows, any file system you can mount has a path. You can mount the research file system using the LCSR samba server. For instance, your research home directory is (for user xyz):
      \\samba.research.rutgers.edu\xyz

and the (not backed-up) temporary space is:
      \\samba.research.rutgers.edu\filer-tmp

(For faculty: change research to cs in the above to access the faculty file system.)

On the LCSR network, just type in this path into an Windows explorer window. From the wireless network, you'll probably also need to log in separately (for user xyz) as LCSR\xyz.

To access this mount later on, just drag the pathname onto your Desktop to make a short-cut.

A different method (and perhaps your only choice in older versions of windows) involves right clicking on the icon My Network Places and select Map Network Drive... From there, type in the path above as the Folder and choose a lettered drive to assign to it.

You can access /koko/village, /farm/village or even /filer/tmp by creating a symbolic link to it in your home directory, by typing the following at a UNIX shell prompt (for /koko/village):

   ln -s /koko/village ~/koko

(This names the link koko; feel free to name it whatever you want.)

PC administration

The PCs are in the LCSR domain (so that access to the file-systems, printers, etc... is through that). But the software on them is administered by us, not LCSR.

If you know what you're doing in Windows, ask about getting admin access (there is a separate account for this). There are those occasional times when you need it; that's just the way of Windows. Here are some ground rules:

• Ask first before upgrading anything. You'd be surprised how much stuff will break that you don't know about (for instance, installing the latest NVIDIA driver will typically break DVD playback on Dell workstations).
• Ask first before installing any software that everyone can run; and be prepared to install it everywhere. If you're installing something standard, then it should be installed everywhere.
• Then, send email to village@cs with the word ADMIN in the subject line saying what you did, why, and on which machine(s). (If it's routine, only for the first time you do it.)
• Finally, be available to fix anything you break.

starts up a Windows command prompt as Administrator (after you supply the password).
You can start up one of the control panel applets as:
      runas /user:Administrator "control desk.cpl"
(here is a list of the applets)

Finally, DO NOT browse the web or check your email (well, running remotely in an ssh window is fine) as Administrator. This is how you get adware, spyware, etc...

Cygwin

Cygwin is set up on all the lab PCs. It provides a unix-like environment for scripting and development. To start it, just double-click on the Cygwin icon sitting on your desktop.

Note: The two older PCs in RuCCS aren't up to date yet.

Note: The icon called Unix Command Prompt is not cygwin, but is a unix shell (tcsh) running inside a Windows shell. It comes with a few common unix commands; it's handy when you want a real shell, and is a slightly more lightweight than Cygwin.

The first time you run Cygwin, you'll need to set up your account. There are some specialized scripts installed for this. Once your shell starts, type the command:
      setup-cygwin

and follow the instructions (you'll probably need to run it twice, and then start a third shell to get started). This one-time process lets Cygwin know about your domain username, among other things.

This setup starts a tcsh and sets things up to use remote CVS access. It provides you with the alias cvsR, which is used to check out files remotely from the cvs repository (after that you can use the regular cvs command).

A convenient way of working with files on the PC is to store them all in the CVS tree. See the CVS info page for more details. This works best for text files or source code. For binary data like images, sounds or movies, be sure to add any binary file to the repository using the -kb switch (see section 9.2 of the online CVS documentation).

Cygwin pathnames are a bit strange. Instead of C: you should use /cygdrive/c. Symbolic links work within Cygwin, but Windows doesn't understand them. The cygwin root directory / translates to the Windows path C:\cygwin; this means that the home directory /home/xyz is located at C:\cygwin\home\xyz.

If you want to run a Windows program with a cygwin pathname, you need to do something special (except for the case where it uses the current working directory, in which case it works just fine). A version of emacs is set up on the machines (separate from the emacs that comes cygwin) so that it should work fine with cygwin pathnames. The alias:
      explorer path

starts up a Windows explorer window in the directory path. You can access samba pathnames directly (just change the back-slashes to forward-slashes.)

If you want this Cygwin setup on your own machine, the latest install for the lab is available in /filer/tmp/village/cygwin. You'll find a README file and the setup scripts there as a tar file. If you want the exact setup as in the lab, just download the gigantic zip file in there (or ask to borrow the CD that contains it). The setup scripts do the following:

• Starts up a tcsh (for those of us who don't like bash :)
• Installs a global .cshrc file and other multi-user admin stuff
• Fixes latex to work with Letter size paper (instead of A4)
• Creates a symbolic link myprof to your windows profile directory
• Gives you the default VILLAGE .emacs file
• Sets you up to run cvs remotely
• Makes sym-links in /usr/local/bin to programs that are installed in the lab, and you might want to run from cygwin