Hitchhikers Guide

to

Linux
David Money Harris
Created 17 January 2011
Revised 1 January, 2015
The VLSI design tools at Harvey Mudd College are hosted on a Linux server named tera.
This document introduces you to connecting with the server, getting around Linux, and
starting the tools.

Connecting to tera
The usual way to connect to tera is from your Windows, Mac, or Linux-based computer using
the X11 display protocol. From Windows, you will need a program such as Cygwin or PuTTy
with Xming, to open an X terminal. Cygwin is installed on the ECF computers and you can
download it for free onto your personal computer using the directions on X11 for Windows.
Cygwin is heavy install so PuTTy is much lighter alternative.
If you have a Mac or Linux, the X Windows software is already built in.
If you are on Windows, choose Start Programs Cygwin-X XWin Server or you can open a
Cygwin terminal, type xlaunch & and accept all the settings. If you are on Mac, run
/Applications/Utilities/X11.app. If you are on Linux, open a new terminal.
IMPORTANT: If you are using Cygwin-X on an Engineering department lab computer,
be sure to exit Cygwin when you are done. Simply logging out and closing the window
doesnt suffice. Instead, you must right-click on the X icon in the Windows taskbar
notification area (in the lower right corner of the screen) and choose Exit
Unfortunately, if you dont exit properly, youll leave a lock file that will prevent others
from using Cygwin on that computer until it is rebooted. If rebooting doesnt fix the
problem, please notify the Engineering Systems Administrator.
IMPORTANT: If you are using Cygwin for the first time on your personal computer or
on a lab computer, it may be necessary to follow the directions in the additional help
section X11 for Windows.
At the terminal, type ssh Y [email protected], where you supply your
username (usually first initial and last name, such as bkeller for Ben Keller). Tera will prompt
you for your password.
The first time you log in, youll be prompted for your year. A link to your Charlie account will
be automatically set up based on that information. Change your password the first time you log
in, by typing passwd and following the prompt.

You will need some files for the various labs. They are located in /courses/e158/15

Getting around Linux

Tera runs Linux CentOS 6.6, which is the old, stable, and preferred release for the CAD tools.
If you arent already familiar with Linux, follow this tutorial to learn your away around.
You can create, view, and manipulate files by typing commands into the terminal. Type
ls

to list the contents of your directory. Youll initially see charlie as the only entry. Well
return to this special entry later. To create a new subdirectory, type
mkdir IC_CAD

when you ls again, youll see

charlie

IC_CAD

To

create a new file, type

gedit foo

The GNOME text editor opens up. Type Hello into the text editor, then save and quit. Now,
Typing
ls l

gives you a longer listing showing more information about the files:
drwxr-xr-x 2 bkeller users 4096 Jan 29 2009 charlie
-rw-rw---- 1 bkeller users
6 Jan 17 12:54 foo drwxrxr-x 2 bkeller users 4096 Jan 17 12:44 IC_CAD

The owner is bkeller, who is part of the group users (you should see your user name instead)
The d indicates that both files are directories. It is followed by three triples of letters. The
first wxr means that the user can write, read, and execute the file (for directories, execute
means to enter the directory). The second means that members of the same group can read
and execute but not write the file. The third means that others not in the same group can also
read and execute but not write. The file size is 4096 bytes, which is standard for a directory.
The IC_CAD directory was created on January 17 of this year at 12:44. foo is not a directory
and is only 6 bytes long (five characters plus the carriage return at the end). It is readable and
writable only by bkeller and other group members. In Linux, file names beginning with a dot
are normally not displayed when you type ls. Usually, configuration files are named this way
so they dont clutter things up. To display everything including the dot files, type

ls -al

Some dot files have already been created in your directory. For example, .bash_profile is a
configuration file invoked on log-in that sets up the paths to find various programs.
To print your current working directory, type
pwd

and youll see

/home/bkeller

To change directory into the new directory you created, type

cd IC_CAD

Now if you type pwd, youll see

/home/bkeller/IC_CAD

To go back up to your home directory (/home/bkeller), type

cd ..

Where .. indicates the directory above where you currently are. (Note that . refers to the
directory where you currently are.) Alternatively, you could have typed
cd /home/bkeller

or
cd /home
cd bkeller

or
cd ~bkeller

where ~bkeller is a shortcut for the home directory of that user (i.e. /home/bkeller)
or just
cd

because cd returns you to your home directory from wherever you are.
To view the contents of a text file, you can open it in an editor such as gedit. However, for
short files, it is often more convenient to use the more command.
more foo

To move or rename a file, type

mv foo foobar

To copy a file, type

cp foobar fooseball

To

remove a file, type rm

foobar

Then type ls to see

charlie fooseball IC_CAD

Linux supports symbolic links, in which one file is really just a pointer to a second. If you
change the second file, the first will change. For example
ln s fooseball foolink

Then when you ls l, youll see what foolink links to. If you were to use gedit to change
fooseball to say Goodbye, then typed more foolink, youd see Goodbye. Thus, symbolic
links are better than copying when you want two files to remain the same.
To change the permissions on a file, use chmod. Chmod takes three octal numbers, indicating
the permissions for the user, the group, and for others. Each number should be the sum of three
bit fields: 4 for read, 2 for write, and 1 for execute. For example,
chmod 644 fooseball

changes the file to be readable and writable by the user and read-only for everyone else. Then
you could move fooseball into IC_CAD and rename it back to foo
mv fooseball IC_CAD/foo

To get rid of the entire IC_CAD folder and its contents, use the recursive option on rm:
rm r IC_CAD

Use this command with care! Open

gedit again by typing gedit
While it is running, the terminal is tied up and cant be used. To fix this, press ctrl-Z in the
terminal to put gedit to sleep. Now gedit becomes unresponsive. Then type
bg

in the terminal to run gedit in the background. Now, you can use both gedit and the
terminal. To find out what processes you have running, type
ps

And youll see something like

PID TTY
29382 pts/1
29905 pts/1
29949 pts/1

TIME CMD
00:00:00 bash
00:00:00 gedit
00:00:00 ps

bash is the Bourne-Again Shell, part of the terminal that interprets the commands you have
been typing. Gedit is running in the background. ps is the command you just invoked. Notice
that each command has a process ID (PID). If a program locks up, you can kill it based on its
PID. For example
kill 29905

kills the gedit session. You would lose any unsaved work, so dont use this unless you have
to.
Instead of putting gedit to sleep and restarting it in the background with separate
commands, you could have typed
gedit &

to invoke it in the background in the first place.

Your tera account should be automatically linked to your tera account. To access your account,
change into that subdirectory. You can then copy files between the systems.
This is particularly helpful to copy over images from tera for a report that you are writing
on your PC.
cd ~/charlie

In the Charlie folder is a README file. To read it and learn about changing your
password, type

more README

Another way to move files between your computer and tera is through an file transport protocol
(FPT) client. WinSCP is a good FPT program for Windows. To get more information about a
command, use man:
man rm

Moving to the Next Level

The commands so far are adequate to get you started. However, Linux is full of other
commands that you will find useful as you become more sophisticated and work with a
greater assortment of files.
!!: repeat the last command
!word: repeat the last command that started with word
*: matches any file name
Ex: rm *.txt removes all files ending with the suffix .txt (dangerous!)
grep: global regular expression print
Ex: grep Hello * prints the lines of all files that contain the word Hello
|: pipe the output of one command to another
Ex: grep Hello * | more displays the results of the grep with more
Other commands
gpdf &:
ps2pdf:
xterm &:
exit:
top:

read a PDF file

convert a Postscript (.ps or .eps) file to PDF
create another terminal window
closes a terminal
display a list of the processes using the most resources

A longer list of commands is located at http://www.ss64.com/bash/

Running Linux and Windows Together

If you find you like Linux and want to install it on your computer but still need access to
Windows-based software, you might want to run it alongside Windows on your PC. You can
configure your computer as dual-boot and select the option of running either one at startup, but
this is a pain because you have to reboot to switch. If your computer has plenty of disk and
RAM, a better option is to use virtualization to run Linux and Windows side-by-side. You can
do this by installing the free Microsoft Virtual PC software, then installing Linux on the virtual
PC. For more information, see
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/articles/Windows/Run_Linux_in_Windows/