Home Computing

Home Computing Advice for COMP1917 Students

Here is some specific advice for Mac users .

You should also check out this CSE taggi page .

If you are using a Windows PC, these are the recommended steps:

Working at CSE through the Internet using Windows

1. Install PuTTY ( http://mirror.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/putty ). This will allow you to log in remotely to the CSE servers and run commands like gcc .
2. Install XMing ( http://mirror.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/xming ). This will allow you to open a graphical editor (xemacs, gvim or gedit) with the window appearing on your home machine.
3. Configure PuTTY and XMing as decsribed in http://taggi.cse.unsw.edu.au/FAQ/Accessing_CSE_login_servers . After logging in with PuTTY, try typing, for example:

   emacs example.c & 

   (remember to type an ampersand "&" at the end of the command, so you will still have a prompt)If you get a message "Error: Can't open display:" it means you haven't configured X11 Forwarding in PuTTY correctly.

Transferring files to/from CSE using Windows

Many students use WinSCP ( winscp.net/eng/index.php ) to transfer files to/from CSE. Here is comprehensive HOWTO .

PuTTY PSCP ( www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html ) provides similar capabilities to PSCP.

Summary (all platforms) for transferring files to/from CSE can be found at http://taggi.cse.unsw.edu.au/FAQ/SCP_and_SFTP

Compiling C Programs on Windows

There are number of C compilers and development environments available for Windows. For example, TDM-gcc ( sourceforge.net/projects/tdm-gcc ) provides a very easy to install version of gcc.

Running Linux on your Windows Computer

If you want more Linux features available you could trying installing CSE Ubuntu virtual machine ( mirror.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/cselubuntu-vm ). Note that it requires VMWare to be installed, and may run very slowly unless you have a reasonably fast computer with at least 4GB of memory. Check that you can:

1. create a local subdirectory (under the Work directory)
2. tranfer a file from your CSE account to the local directory
3. edit it locally (using emacs, gvim or gedit)
4. compile it locally using gcc
5. transfer the edited file back to your CSE directory

If you are feeling ambitious, you could try installing Wubi or a full installation of Linux in a separate partition (make sure you have backups!).
CSESoc periodically run Installfests where they will assist you with installing Linux, Wubi or just PuTTY/Xming.

Yet another option is to install Cygwin ( www.cygwin.com ) along with WinSCP. For Cygwin, you should start by installing just the base, devel and util packages. You can install more packages later, as you need them.

If you have any trouble, you can ask your Lab instructor for help, or post a message to the Course MessageBoard.