You'll be reading documents in various formats, wanting to access computers remotely, and using both commercial and custom software. I'll link to some things that might be useful.

A package called imagemagick is installed on hven. Among other things, it has a program called display which you can invoke simply by typing "display filename" on the unix command line. An even more useful program is convert, which can convert among numerous file-types (image formats). Just type something like "convert filename.ps filename.jpg". Try it.... Many documents, including most papers that are available on-line, are in a format called PDF. You can read pdf files with a free piece of software called acrobat reader. A keyed version of acrobat distiller, which creates pdf files as well as reads them is available from the college's software server. In general, there is a fair amount of useful software on the college's software server. You can browse it on your network neighborhood ("data_software") if you have a pc, and through you chooser if you have a mac. Other documents you'll want to read are in postscript format and require ghostview. Here's a compressed macintosh version of ghostview. And here's ghostview for windows. If you don't have powerpoint installed on your computer (it's part of MS Office), you can get a free viewer for windows or for macintosh. If you're working with plot or transform, then these users guides might come in handy: plot transform And if you need a copy of VNC, here is a zipped version of the viewer for the PC and here's a stuff-it archive containing the viewer for the mac. If you're using VNC to connect to hven, you'll have to set up a vnc session first by issuing the command: vncserver -depth 16 -geometry 1024x768 :44 from hven itself (which you can either be sitting at, or accessing via telnet). Note that in the above example, I've used a certain screen size and started session number 44. You can use whatever reasonable values you want for these things. Once you've gotten the vncserver session going on hven, you can access it from your computer using the above viewer (unzipped, of course), simply by double clicking on the application, and connecting to hven.swarthmore.edu:44 (you'll be asked for the password you set). A session can be terminated with a command like vncserver -kill :44 If hven reboots (most likely because the electricity has gone out in Dupont), you will have to restart your vnc session. But if it wasn't terminated nicely, there may be files left around that prevent you from using the same vnc session number when you restart the program. When you try to restart the session, you'll get an error message telling you that a file with a name like X44 needs to be deleted. You can delete it with the unix "rm" command. Eric Jensen has put together some information about computers in the lab and research group(s) from the point of view of hven, the Linux machine. But some of it will be useful to other users. Particularly, information about SSH and telnet, which are means of logging into a computer from another computer. This is handy, for example, if you need to restart your VNC session on hven (because hven's been rebooted, or the electricity has gone out). Have a look at Eric's page.

Return to David's Home Page