How can I get an account on MathLAN?
Can our student organization have its own account?
How can I change my MathLAN password?
How can I get back a file that I deleted by mistake?
How can I create a subdirectory within my home directory?
There's a subdirectory of my home directory that I no longer need. How do I get rid of it?
If you're a Grinnell College student, faculty member, or staff member, just bring your ID to Science 2418. The manager of MathLAN will set up an account for you and give you the password. The process takes only a couple of minutes.
If you're not a member of the Grinnell College community, you're out of luck, unless you have very good contacts.
No, there are no group accounts on MathLAN. However, the manager of MathLAN can set up a file-ownership group for you, so that any member of the group can arrange for files in her own home directory to be readable by other members of the group but not by the world at large. Send him e-mail listing the members of the group you'd like to establish.
Log in, using your current password. Move the mouse pointer onto the small
image of a monitor on the panel at the bottom of the screen.
Click the left mouse button once to open up a window in which the
gnome-terminal emulator is running. Move the mouse pointer into
that window and type the word password. Press the
Enter key at the end. You'll be asked to type in your old
password once and the new password twice, pressing Enter at
the end each time. (Neither password will appear on screen when you type
it, so watch your fingers instead of the screen.) If you give your old
password correctly and the two versions of your new password match, you'll
see an acknowledgement that your password has been changed; otherwise,
you'll get an error message, in which case you should try again.
The passwords on MathLAN accounts are reviewed at irregular intervals. You may be asked to change your password again if you select one that can be guessed too easily. Avoid using common words, names, or abbreviations as passwords; try to choose passwords that include digits, punctuation marks, or nonsense syllables.
Users' home directories are backed up fully five times a year (about January 6, March 21, May 31, August 16, and October 21) and an incremental backup is performed at 4 a.m. every day except Wednesday. If your file existed at the time one of these backups was performed, it can probably be restored. On the other hand, if you created and then deleted the file, or a new version of the file, between backups, it's gone forever.
Some application programs, notably GNU Emacs and DrScheme, create backup files automatically. Check the directory for similarly named files that might be automatic backups.
In a window in which the gnome-terminal terminal emulator is running, type
a2ps filename
(putting the name of your file in place of filename, of course). If you're in the lab or the computer-equipped classroom, this will send the print job to one of the printers in the lab -- which one it goes to depends on which workstation you happen to be using.
The a2ps program has many bells and whistles, which can be activated by means of command-line options. For example, the command
a2ps -2 -r -P pacioli filename
prints two pages on one sheet, in landscape mode
(when you read the
printout, you'll hold it so that it is wider than it is long), on the
printer named pacioli (in Science 2417).
In a window in which the gnome-terminal terminal emulator is running, type
cd; mkdir directory-name
(putting the name of the subdirectory you want to create in place of directory-name). The command that actually creates the subdirectory is mkdir; the cd; at the beginning is just to make sure that your current working directory is your home directory.
Alternatively, open up the Nautilus file manager by double-clicking with
the left mouse button on the icon of a folder with a house on the front of
it, near the upper left corner of your desktop. When its window appears,
select Create Folder from the File menu. A new folder
icon, labelled untitled folder
, will appear in the window. Replace
the label with the name that you want the new directory to have.
First, look over the files that are in that subdirectory and move any of them that you want to keep into your home directory or other subdirectories. For instance, if the subdirectory is called delendum and you want to keep a file named precious in that subdirectory, go to a gnome-terminal window and type
cd ~/delendum; mv precious ~
This will move precious into your home directory.
Now that your current working directory is the subdirectory that you want to delete (because of the cd part of the command shown above), remove all the remaining files, move up to your home directory, and use the rmdir command to get rid of the directory:
rm ./*; cd ..; rmdir delendum
Some of the programs that are available on MathLAN give special treatment to files with names containing suffixes of this sort. The operating system itself pays no attention to them, so you can create files with whatever names you like; only the application programs (the Java compiler, Firefox, and the like) force you to use special conventions.
Here are some of the commonly seen suffixes and their conventional meanings:
device-independentprinting codes, usually output from TeX
encapsulatedPostScript document
header filefor use with a C, C++, or Pascal program
Yes. If you're initiating the file transfer from a non-MathLAN computer, have your software send the request to our ftp server, ftp.math.grinnell.edu.
It is also possible to initiate file transfers from MathLAN computers, using the command-line interface ftp or the graphical interface gftp.
We also maintain an anonymous ftp server for some documents published by our students and faculty.
The system administrator archives each graduate's home directory and removes each graduate's account on or shortly after July 1. You can ask him to delay the removal until some subsequent July 1 simply by sending him an e-mail request, specifying the year in which the account can be removed.
Here are some sources of answers:
This document is available on the World Wide Web as
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/mathlan/faq.xhtml
