CAEDM's Knowledge Base contains some info on UNIX basics. Typing man in an xterm followed by a command you want to learn about provides access to UNIX online manual pages, an excellent source of information. There are also many excellent guides and tutorials available on the internet, such as "UNIX Tutorial for Beginners."

On the login screen, click "Sessions" . Choose your preferred window manager/desktop environment, then log in normally.

Check out the "X window manager" Wikipedia article and the excellent catalog of window managers available at xwinman.org .

There are two basic categories of Spice machine: those that run HP-UX, and those that run GNU/Linux. The HP-UX machines all have large gray cases with a small built-in LCD. The other Spice machines are running GNU/Linux. It's important to know that although they are very similar, HP-UX and GNU/Linux are two different operating systems. What works on one will not necessarily work on the other.

There are two files which execute when you log in to your account. These are the .cshrc and .login files. They contain information about how your account is set up. Your .cshrc file is executed every time you log in (or open a new terminal window) and is usually used to control your UNIX environment. It is also used to store aliases, which are like DOS batch files or Pro/E mapkeys.

Your .cshrc file is a hidden file (because it begins with a ".") and is found in your home directory. Once logged in, you can access it through the path:

~username/.cshrc

where "username" is your CAEDM username.

When started, the TC shell executes the .cshrc found in the user's home directory. This can be used to set variables and to define aliases. A sample .cshrc is available here for download. If you would like to use it, download it to your home directory and rename it to ".cshrc"

Any UNIX text editor will do, such as Pico, NEdit, Emacs, or Vi. To open your .cshrc file in Vi, for example, type:

vi ~/.cshrc

Changes to the .login and .cshrc files will not take effect until you log out and log back in. Alternatively, when you make changes to the .cshrc file, you can make these changes take effect by typing

source ~/.cshrc

or

source ~/.login

which cause the computer to read and execute the indicated file. If you have more than one session open, this command will only affect the session in which it is entered. All subsequently opened windows will be affected by these changes.

There is a line in the .cshrc file which says:

set prompt="`hostname`% "

which is what gives you a UNIX prompt that shows the computer name, the character '%', and a space. You, however, may want a prompt which says "Don't worry, be happy", tells you the current working directory, and has a ":-)" at the end. You can do that by editing the 'set prompt=' line, changing it to something like this:

set prompt= "Don't worry, be happy %. :-) "

The special sequence "%." prints out the current working directory, whatever that happens to be at the time. Note that any changes to the .cshrc file will not go into effect until the next time you log in unless you can force them to take effect by typing:

source ~/.cshrc

For more detail, check out this online article: Making friends with C-shell and TC-shell. For a full reference, read the tcsh man pages by typing man tcsh in an xterm or by browsing the online version. You can also visit the TCSH home page.

You can select your preferred shell in the CAEDM Account Manager.