MFCF/CSCF FAQ: Customization of your environment (UNIX and X)
MFCF/CSCF FAQ: Customization of your environment (UNIX and X) |
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If you find out-dated, inaccurate or confusing items or you think that something should be added in this file, please send e-mail to consultant@math.uwaterloo.ca.
How do I set up my account so that "finger myuserid" shows my current finger information i.e. my name, home address and phone number, etc.?
Use the command chfn at the prompt. It will start an interactive session and will ask you to enter the relevant information.
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Last updated 1998-07-13
by kdaudjee
accounts/finger.faq
To change your default shell execute the following:
chshYou will be prompted to enter a new shell. At the prompt, enter the following:
/xhbin/tcshFor the changes to take effect, you will need to logout and login again.OR
/xhbin/bash
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Last updated 2005-09-26
by rmblanco
shells/shell_change_default.faq
If your unix account responds with ___:command not found when you ask it to run something you are sure it should be able to find, you may have a problem with your .cshrc file (this holds some of the initial settings for your account). You can reset it to the default, but you will have to recreate any changes you have made to it. See the question below for more details.
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Last updated 2000-02-18
by AF
shells/shell_cnf.faq
TWM is the window manager you get by default. If you are not already getting twm, it could be that you have the start-up file (.rc file) for some other window manager such as mwm or awm. Move that file (.mwmrc, .awmrc or whatever) aside and the system will start twm for you when it sees that you have no other window manager's start-up file present.
Then to get colour, you need to make a personal copy of the standard .twmrc file. To find out where to get this standard twmrc file, look in your .xsession file. If it's the standard one, it refers to a global xsession file. Look in there and you'll find the path of the standard twmrc file. Note, however, that this path only works on X11 console servers (also called front-end machines), and not on CPU servers. Copy that to your personal .twmrc. E.g.
cp /software/x11-mfcfenv/config/twmrc ~/.twmrc
Now add a section near the top of it to set your colour definitions. You'll see the place where the monochrome definitions are currently set. See "man twm" for details about the syntax of this file and the colour definitions.
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Created by KKB
Last updated 2004-11-24
by am2stewa
shells/shell_custom.faq
You need to change your default shell as specified in Changing Default Unix Shell ; For the changes to take effect, you will need to logout and login again.
But my up arrow still doesn't work!
or, alternatively, up arrow works but cursor keys don't work as expected. Or, perhaps, command history seems to work but commands don't come out as expected.
bindkey could be set incorrectly. Look in your .cshrc file, and change any calls to "bindkey -e" to "bindkey -v" (or vice versa).
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Last updated 2004-07-20
by mpatters
shells/shell_history.faq
You need to restore a working version of these files, which can be accomplished in two ways:
If your PATH environment variable is still set properly (your shell can still find commands), you can perform an init_home command which backups your current .cshrc, .login and .logout files and copies the system defaults of these files into your account. You can then update these to your current settings with any errors hopefully fixed.
If your PATH is currently messed up, then you'll have to type the full pathname of the command. That can be found by /bin/showpath f=init_home standard
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Last updated 1999-02-21
by CBF
shells/shell_wrecked.faq
The default window manager for the math student UNIX environment is twm (Tab Window Manager).
Some other window manages are:
To specify which window manager to run, you will need to modify your $HOME/.xsession file [Warning: Errors in your $HOME/.xsession file can prevent you from starting an X-session. Know what you are doing.]
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Last updated 1998-10-14
by JT
shells/wm_choose.faq
Simply remove or rename the existing .xsession, log out, log back in. A new default one will be created automatically.
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Last updated 1997-05-09
by IB
shells/xsession_wrecked.faq
CDE, the Common Desktop Environment, is yet another windowing environment. It is offered in the Math Research collection of machines starting in March, 2001. The OpenWindows environment becomes available at the same time. Here are some tips about using CDE, and explanations for common problems.
No. They are options you may choose. You can continue to use the older simpler environment that MFCF has been providing all along. The advantage to the MFCF environment is that it is simpler, and is supported here. But it is not very flashy. The advantage to OpenWindows is that if you are accustomed to older Sun machines, OpenWindows will be more familiar to you. The disadvantages to OpenWindows are that it works best with a Sun-style keyboard (which is available for NCD X terminals), and that MFCF doesn't provide much consultation about how it works. The advantage to CDE is that it is becoming popular and offers a more modern, flashy, graphical look. The disadvantage is that MFCF doesn't (yet) provide much consultation about how it works. It also seems to put more of a load on the host computers.
CDE comes with recent versions of Solaris. In the Math region of machines, the login hosts that run Solaris are hopper.math, fe101.math, and fe02.math, and those three hosts now offer CDE. (Machines belonging to various research groups as well as some personal workstations also run recent versions of Solaris and may be set up to offer CDE.)
Starting at the login screen, i.e. the one that says "Welcome to remote host hostname" with a Sun Microsystems logo, all over a black background, do the following before giving your userid and password:
Now log in as usual.
You may find that when you start a dtterm window (dtterm is CDE's equivalent of xterm), the fonts are all stretched out with wide spacing in between. CDE expects a set of its own special fonts to be available, but your X terminal doesn't know about them. We have tried to make all the X terminals know about them automatically but we may have missed some. Run the command "xwantfonts cde/F3bitmaps" and try it again. Notify ncd-maintainer@math that your terminal is missing these fonts so we can fix it.
If you still have this dtterm font problem or some other strange font problem with applications that cannot be displayed properly, send mail to ncd-maintainer@math to report it. Your X terminal probably needs to be reconfigured to run a newer version of its software that understands the font format (namely PCF) of CDE's special fonts. This may require adding more memory to your X terminal.
If you use dtmail, you'll discover that it does not send your message when you click on the Send button. (We encourage the use of more generic mail tools such as mail, pine, elm, but if you really want to use CDE's dtmail, you can.) Dtmail needs special configuration in order to be able to send mail. That's because it tries to use a special protocol to talk to the sendmail service, but we don't run Sun's customized sendmail service, we run a more secure Waterloo-customized sendmail service. So, to make dtmail stop trying to talk to sendmail in that specialized way, put the following line in your .mailrc file in your home directory:
set smtpmailserver='mail.math.uwaterloo.ca'
(Note that this specifies the location of the Math mail service, not a mail address for users. In other words, don't start addressing email to userid@mail.math. Continue to use an address like userid@math.)
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Last updated 2001-03-12
by rblanders
xwin/cde.faq
The online INTRODUCTION TO X AND UNIX TUTORIAL is a good starting point for obtaining such information.
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Last updated 2006-03-15
by d3wilkin
xwin/tutorial.faq
Error: Can't Open display
This error often happens because the X-terminal window in which you are executing the failing command does not have the DISPLAY environment set.
Most MFCF machines run locally-modified software which ensures that the DISPLAY environment is exported between machines properly when one uses rlogin to start a remote session. This doesn't always work, however.
Sometimes you will get a hint that this has failed as the machine login session in question gives diagnostics like the following:
esize: unknown character, exiting.
`/.software/local/.admin/bins/bin/xdisplay -D`: No match
following the usual "message-of-the-day".
It is an easy problem to remedy. Go to one of the other shells which works (i.e. where you can run X applications no problem). Usually the "console" login window (usually in the bottom left corner) is guaranteed to be set up properly.
In that window, type
echo $DISPLAY
and the response will be the name of the display, which is the name
of the X terminal with a suffix, usually ":0".
In the window with the remote session running in it (i.e. the one that doesn't run X applications correctly) type
setenv DISPLAY xxx
where xxx is the name of the display, as revealed above.
For example,
setenv DISPLAY landen120.math.uwaterloo.ca:0
If you try to run an X application now and you get a permission problem, check the following section entitled Cannot Open Display - Not Authorized to Connect to Server .
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Last updated 2002-10-08
by arpepper
xwin/xterm_display.faq
X-terminals load fonts using tftp. For security reasons, we restrict the set of places that tftp is able to access. Users' home directories are not accessible by tftp. Until there is a way to allow more localized control over font availability, you must request that we add your fonts to the central collection. One way to do this is to submit a work request providing the name of needed fonts, and where they can be obtained.
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Last updated 1999-07-08
by cmroth
xwin/xterm_fonts.faq
Xlib: connection to "glenlivet.mfcf.uwaterloo.ca:0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Client is not authorized to connect to Server
X11 Toolkit Error : Can't open display: glenlivet.mfcf.uwaterloo.ca:0.0
Bailing out!
Okay, there are two answers to this. The recommended way is to use the Xauthority mechanism. This requires that you have Xauthority available on both ends of the system (this is true for all MFCF machines). Let us assume that you are trying to run a program on bacon.math, but you logged onto beta.math.
To see if you have Xauthority, try running the command:
xauth nextract - $DISPLAY
which should print something that looks like:
0000 0004 8161d81d 0001 30 0012 4d49542d4d414749432d434f4f4b49452d31
0010 39325a 797659693251354d4b57567045
This is what is known as a "cookie". Any program that wants access to your Xterminal must have this "cookie". To get it over to the other "remote" machine (in this case bacon.math), you run the following on the "local" machine (in this case beta.math):
xauthdist bacon.math
or if your userid on the remote machine is different:
xauthdist -l myotheruserid bacon.math
The xauthdist command is a convenient wrapper for the following which you can use if xauthdist is not available:
xauth extract - $DISPLAY | rsh bacon.math xauth merge -
^---- or whatever machine
or
xauth extract - $DISPLAY | rsh math -l eadengle xauth merge -
^----- for when your account
name is different
In order for this to work, you must have remote privileges to your bacon.math account from beta.math. So, on bacon.math, if you have the file ~/.rhosts, make sure it has the line
beta.math.uwaterloo.ca eadengle
This also means that you will not have to retype your password
when you do an rlogin. (Substitute your own userid
instead of the example "eadengle".)
This will "extract" the cookie from your beta.math account, and "merge" it with the other cookies you have over on bacon.math. Now, any program that you run on bacon.math in your account will have access to your display, and nobody else will.
If you Xauthority is not enabled on your system, then there is an older method, but it is not secure. On the local machine beta.math, you use the command xhost:
xhost +bacon.math
This will allow X programs running on bacon.math to open
displays on beta.math. However, this allows _anybody_
on bacon.math to do this, not just you! For example, this means
that somebody could open an X program to watch for you typing
passwords on your keyboard. Do not use this unless you have no
other option! If Xauthority is not enabled, complain to your
system administrator to have it enabled.
Sometime things go wrong with this procedure. If you think you are already doing everything correctly, perhaps see the other hints in the related section. ( Setting the display )
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Created by rblander
Last updated 2006-03-15
by d3wilkin
xwin/xterm_xauth.faq