INDEX
LINUX
Should you wish, you can install Ubuntu on your laptop
and/or home machine. The TAs will be available to help
you with this.
A particularly straightforward and safe method to install
Ubuntu is to use wubi, which will do the installation within
your Windows system, just like any other software you might
install.
See HERE
for instructions.
Also, with this specific type of installation, the software
can subsequently be uninstalled, again within Windows.
Finally, note that it is always very good practice to
periodically perform backups on all of your computers,
especially if they contain information that is important to
you. Even if you are using the wubi approach, it is a
good idea to perform a backup before the install if you can,
just to extra safe.
MAPLE
Maple is a commercial product, so if you wish to install it
on a personal machine, you will have to purchase it. A
link to the on-line store is HERE.
However, you certainly do not have to have your own copy to
do the Maple work in this course.
PuTTY
(ssh
client for Windows)
If you don't have a ssh
client installed on
your Windows machine(s), you can download and install the
free package, PuTTY HERE. I recommend
that you click the "A
Windows installer for everything except PuTTYtel"
link in the "latest
release version (beta 0.60)" section, save the file
to disk, then double click on the file icon to inititate the
installation. Once installed, you will be able to use
PuTTY to open
terminal windows to remote machines such as hyper. This in turn will
allow you to do basic command-line work on hyper, and other
machines that accept ssh
connections, from within Windows.
XMing: (X Server for Windows)
Installation of this free software on your PC/laptop running
Windows will allow you to run an X server on your system
(without installing Linux). In particular, your will
then be able to ssh
into hyper.phas.ubc.ca
and start up graphical applications such as gedit, xmaple etc., and the
applications will appear on your Windows screen.
Performance won't be as good as it would be if you had Linux
installed and were running applications locally, but
provided that your network connection is sufficiently fast,
it should suffice for you to do at least some of your
homework and term project work outside of the computer lab.
The software can be downloaded from HERE, and there is
additional documentation about installing and using it HERE.
IMPORTANT!
Before you install XMing,
you should install the PuTTY
ssh-client (see above), which you will use to establish
connections between your Windows machine and hyper. During the
process of installing Xming
you will be presented with a Select Components dialog: choose the Normal PuTYY Link SSH client
option.
Once you have installed Xming,
and assuming you have placed an Xming icon on your desktop, you start the
server simply by clicking on the icon (alternately, you can
start Xming from
the All Programs
menu). Once the server starts, you won't see any
specific windows etc. associated with Xming, but an "X" icon should appear on
the panel, indicating that it is running. Right
clicking on the icon will give you a pull-down menu that
includes an option to exit the server.
Also, when using PuTTY in
conjunction
with Xming, you
should ensure that any connections that you establish to hyper, or other machines
on which you wish to run graphical applications, have X
forwarding enabled; otherwise those applications (like gedit or gnuplot)
will not be able to display on your Windows system.
Note that PuTTY has
a facility for saving and loading sessions (with the
configuration settings saved as well), that you should learn
how to use.
(You way notice in some of the on-line information about Xming that you are
supposed to be able to download Xming's own ssh-client, XMing-portablePuTTY, for
free, but, at least at this time, that does not seem to be
the case.)
OCTAVE
In principle you can install
octave on a Windows machine, but it isn't
straightforward, and may not be worth the effort. Note
that assuming that you have putty and xming
installed, you should be able to ssh to the main
PHAS server, hyper, and use octave from
there.
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