Home Computing Advice for COMP1911/COMP1917 Students

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

1. Install Putty and Xming. Run them and make sure you can:
   1. log into your CSE account
   2. open a graphical editor (xemacs, gvim or gedit) with the window appearing on your home machine (remember to type an ampersand "&" after the name of the editor, so you will still have a prompt)
   3. edit and compile a file remotely

2. Install CSE-Ubuntu. 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

3. Once you are comfortable with Putty/Xming and/or CSE-Ubuntu, and if you are feeling ambitious, you can try installing Cygwin and WinSCP. For Cygwin, you should start by intalling just the base, devel and util packages. You can intall more packages later, as you need them.

This table summarizes the functions you will need, and how they are provided under the various options:

	Function	Mac	CSE-Ubuntu	Putty/Cygwin
1.	log into your CSE account remotely through a terminal window	ssh	CSE Terminal	Putty
2.	open additional windows remotely on your home machine	XDarwin	vmplayer	Xming
3.	transfer files between CSE account and home machine	scp	drag-and-drop	WinSCP
4.	run Unix commands and programs on your home machine	Terminal	Work Terminal	Cygwin

Those with an old or slow computer might need to use CSE-Lubuntu instead of CSE-Ubuntu.

CSE-Ubuntu is more than a Gigabyte in size. If you have limited download capacity, you might like to bring a memory stick into one of the computing labs and tranfer it that way.

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