Introduction to DEC Workstations

Getting Started

To use any of the workstations you must first have an account on the Duke workstation network. It may be obtained at the Consulting Desk (room 136 North Building, 660-2983).

Find a free workstation at one of the UNIX clusters on campus:

133 Soc/Psych
139 Engineering
100 North
106 Teer Eng. Lib.
125 Carr

In addition, all the workstations are accessible from Duke terminals and PC clusters, and from home computers equipped with modems by dialing 684-4900 (8-n-1, 1200--9600bps). Read Introduction to the DEC Workstations at Duke (available at the Gothic Bookshop) or ask other users for more information.

To login to a workstation jiggle the mouse and a ``login'' window should appear. Enter your userid and your password and hit Return. First a Message-of-the-day window will appear. Read it and click the button on the bottom of this window to continue. When the outline of the Session-Manager window appears on the screen press the left mouse button, drag the window to the bottom of the screen and then release the mouse button (you will need the session-manager window later to quit your session). Two more Xterm windows will appear on the screen. Using the mouse position the cursor into one of these two windows. Now you are all set to start your session.

If this is your first usage of the system you should immediately change your password. Do this by typing:

passwd

and following instructions. Be sure to remember your new password, you will need it to login next time.

Some basic UNIX commands

Some basic UNIX commands that will be useful:

ls (think: list) shows a list of all files in your current directory.
rm filename (think: remove) removes a file named filename
cp filename1 filename2 (think: copy) copies a file called filename1 to a new file called filename2.
cd directoryname (think: change directory) to directory named directoryname
pwd (think: present working directory)
more filename (displays file a screenful at a time)
top (think: top jobs) lists the big jobs running on your workstation. Useful to see if the machine is really busy running other processes in addition to your work.
pico filename (edit the file called filename with the pico editor

Ending the Session

To log out of the machine, move the mouse cursor to the word Session in the Session Manager window, hold down the left mouse button, drag the pointer to the word Quit, and release the button. All your windows should disappear, and the login window should reappear on the screen (Typing exit or logout will only log you out of an xterm window, but not from the machine)!