Frequently Asked Questions

I forgot my DECF username or password, I need a cardkey to access the labs afterhours, I need more quota (space) on my account, etc etc. (any other DECF-specific questions)

Please contact the DECF support staff at consult@newton.berkeley.edu. If you're not sure whether a question is appropriate for the DECF staff, email your GSI first.

How can I work on the DECF computers from home?

See the last section of the UnixTutorial for more information.

I have been working on exercises on my home computer but I'd like to transfer my files to my DECF machines (for submission or whatever other purposes).

You will need to use the Secure File Transfer Protocol to move files between your personal machine and your DECF home directory. There are various software programs that can do this via nice graphical interfaces, e.g. Fugu for OS X. http://software.berkeley.edu/ makes Fugu available for all students w/ valid Calnet IDs; Windows users are a little less lucky and will need to find an SFTP program from the web, eg. WinSCP.

I'm confused by all these different text editors. Which one should I use?

The choice of a text editor in UNIX is mainly based on personal preferences. Some people swear by emacs while others cannot think of using anything by vi. So, ultimately, which one you choose is entirely up to you. However, here are some considerations:

• vi: The vi editor is the 'standard' editor in UNIX and as such, has a pretty big following in the UNIX community. Once you've learned it, it is a very powerful editor with many many useful features. There are no menus to interact with and all commands are based on keystrokes. Thus, there is a rather steep learning curve for this editor. There are many references online if you google 'vi help' and related search phrases.

• emacs: The emacs editor is pretty common amongst the computer science community, because it is highly customizable and has many super-useful features like syntax highlighting (Options->Syntax Highlighting menu option) and automatic indents, which makes a programmer's life much easier. People who are experienced with emacs usually rely on keystrokes to perform tasks but for the beginners, many of the emacs versions now support menu systems. This makes emacs a powerful editor with a slightly less steep learning curve than vi. Obviously, accessing the menus using the mouse only works if you're physically at a UNIX machine or you've set up X forwarding from your home computer, so if you're unfamiliar with the keystrokes for basic tasks (like opening and saving files), you may want to save the use of this editor for when you're at Etcheverry.

• pico: Sort of opposite of vi and emacs is the text editor called pico, which is a very basic but easy-to-use editor. People who have ever used pine for reading emails have essentially already used pico. Pico is nice for beginners because even though there are no menus, the list of commands is shown at the bottom of the screen, so it's much less cryptic than emacs and vi. However, on the flipside is that there are no nice programming features such as automatic indents, etc. For simple and short programs, however, pico is a great choice; in addition, if you're accessing the DECF computers remotely via SSH, pico also makes a lot of sense because it's very easy to use even without mouse control.

• gedit: Notepad-like text editor from the GNOME desktop.

If you're working from home on a Windows machine (with ActivePerl), your choices are a bit different. Some of your options include:

• notepad: The simplest possible text editor on windows. Like Pico, there are no fancy features here, just bare bones text editing. As with all windows editors, this one of course has graphical menus.

• Textpad: Textpad, although a great basic text editor, also has a variety of useful features. Aside from syntax highlighting and automatic indenting (after being appropriately set up), it can also create a shortcut to execute the file you're currently editing (which saves time switching back and forth to the console!). My personal favorite editor for everything that has 10 or fewer files {after that, you should really think about a full blown IDE (integrated development evironment)}.

• Eclipse: If you need a little more programming muscle, Eclipse provides a great, free way to get it. Eclipse is an open source IDE, and someone produced a perl plugin for it. This is significantly more complicated to set up - see the epic site for an overview of the installation process, and this site for how to start using perl. However, for all your hard work, you get syntax highlighting, on-the-fly syntax check, content assist, perldoc support, source formatter, templating support, a Perl debugger, and a regular expression plugin. In other words, the whole schebang.

-- AngiChau - 17 Sep 2005