Like I said in class, you can use PuTTY to access the machine ada.cs.iit.edu. Most of you in this class are familiar with Matlab and running your programs within that environment, but to real computational science software you
often need to work in a UNIX environment because of the access to compilers and libraries as well as structure of the file system. The penalty of working within UNIX is that almost everything is that most things need to be
done from the command line. Refer to the UNIX Help section for more info about that.
Obviously before you can become comfortable with UNIX you need to be able to access the machine. After you have downloaded PuTTY, go ahead and run it. That will start up a GUI that looks like
Fill in the Host Name with the address of the computer you are trying to access: for this class we are working on ada.cs.iit.edu. Once you click open you will enter a terminal which asks for your User Name and
Password. You were given this information on BlackBoard - your user name is probably the same as your IIT ID and the password will have to be changed after you successfully log in the first time.
When you first click enter, PuTTY will ask you if you want to accept the remote key - just click Yes as this is a technical issue that you needn't worry about. You likely won't be asked about this again.
At this point you are logged on to the CS computer and you'll need to use the command line to accomplish things. If you are interested in moving files to the ada.cs machine, check out the WinSCP section.
If you want info on how to open graphics from the CS server, check out X forwarding.
